this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Do you think this is Threads' final form? Embrace, extend, extinguish. This is what corporations do. Everything is a zero sum game in their minds, and they will act in the best interest of shareholders. That shit has no business here.
I was going to reply but you nailed it. Its about outmaneuvering smaller competitors and controlling the marketplace, and then harvesting user data for profit.
They can already harvest the data. Nothing on the ActivityPub is private
Sure, ignore my actual point. This is getting monotonous; enjoy Threads.
What point was that? If you don't join Threads, they don't have your data. They do have everything you publish to the Fediverse though, no matter what you do.
Buddy...
Work on your reading retention instead of plastering your one-note hot take all over the convo. This exchange is over.
How? Everyone says some form of this, but never gives any details of how they will do that. Or how defederation will prevent that.
You are afraid that they will control the marketplace, and then turn around telling everyone to defederate, which just gives them a walled garden marketplace on a silver platter.
Yeah, yeah, parrot the line and then please explain how?
Extending means making extra functionality that others haven't implemented, so that your offering is more attractive. You use it to build a walled garden. Defederation just skips that step and does it for them. They don't even have to extend.
You missed the point of my comment. I don't need to explain how, I'm sure they've got brilliant engineers working hard on it. This is just how capitalism works, Meta isn't a benevolent force here, their ultimate goal is to make money off users and their data.
I don't need to figure out exactly how they will do it to know that they will.
Ah, so just fear mongering and hoping that the fear based knee-jerk reaction isn't actually playing directly into their hands.
Dude, Meta has a terrible track record. They've shown us time and time again that they are outright evil. Why would it be different this time?
What's the saying? "When someone shows you who their are, trust them the first time"
In this instance, Meta has shown time and time again who they are and you still believe they will do something right.
I'm not saying it's different. I'm saying that the current plan in no achieves the goal of keeping the fediverse open and out of the control of large corporations.
If you want to know how to prevent them from taking control, you better start working out the specifics of how they will do that. Otherwise your actions may end up helping them.
No one seems to have considered the possibility that Facebook are well aware of what people think of them. That they looked at the technology and thought "we don't have to do anything, those idiots hate us so much they will do the job for us and give us the private marketplace we desire"
Serious question: how?
Second question: why?
What are the mechanics by which they are going extend or extinguish the fediverse and how would they do that from a technical standpoint? Second, why when the entire fediverse with years of time behind it is a rounding error compared to a product they launched like 6 months ago. Why does Meta give a tiny shit about the fedi compared to TikTok, for example?
"Extend" typically means adding proprietary features to your own product that are incompatible with your competitor's product. For example, what if they added Gold (as in the old Reddit kind, not the current Reddit kind)? That obviously wouldn't work with Lemmy, or at least not right away. The Lemmy devs would have to try to play catch-up whenever Threads launched a new feature. And not every would be able to be made compatible with Lemmy in some way.
There are several potential reasons for this. They could see Lemmy as a potential future threat, and using the EEE method may squash the potential threat before it actually becomes one.
ActivityPub itself is also actually a neat feature to offer. It's basically Single Sign-On (aka SSO) without a few steps. (This is not me giving Facebook the benefit of the doubt. Companies can have multiple reasons for doing something, and I cannot believe this is the only reason Facebook would experiment with ActivityPub.)
As for your point about TikTok, TikTok itself is already too big to use the EEE method. (It usually only works on smaller competitors.) Facebook is using a different method for that: it cloned TikTok. Their version is called Reels.
As for the "rounding error" comment, Facebook actually had "accounts" created on Threads for all of its Instagram users, so, while there may be billions of accounts, not all of them are active. As a matter of fact, I've heard Threads use dropped pretty significantly after its initial launch. In that case, Facebook could be using a strategy I've seen both Sony and Microsoft use in regards to their game consoles: whenever Sony is in "second place" in the its console war with Microsoft and losing users to them, it tries to get people to migrate back over by adding features its userbase wants. Whenever Sony is on top, however, they tend to stop listening to customer feedback and sit on their laurels. I've seen Microsoft employ a similar strategy, too.