You might downvote this, go ahead, I know you hate proprietary goods, but just listen.

Is anyone excited to see that Threads is soon to federate with us on to the fediverse? I know I am, and this is becuase I can communicate with my family from Lemmy or Mastodon as I mainly use these two platforms. I am also not saying that Threads is good, its a bad platform in terms of privacy, and Meta is notoriously shitty in terms of user data collection. I’m making this post because I was just wondering if there is someone out there like me who likes the move what Meta is doing with Threads in federating with us. We just got to be aware and be cautious and get ready because we might “spam” Threads.

I’m also not trying to get on the wrong foot, I’m just in love with Free Software, and seeing Lemmy here and discovering the Fediverse is so amazing to me. I love it already and am going to stay on it for most of my online journey.

Thoughts?

Source:

CBC

  • sorrybookbrokeEnglish
    392·
    9 months ago

    Edit: Please don’t downvote OP. It’s a good discussion and their opinions are well written

    They’ll do exactly what google did to XMPP, an alternate chat platform running in the same manner as mastadon and lemmy do. They federated, and since google had more people XMPP users found the majority of their contact lists were filled with google users. Most google based users had no idea what XMPP was.

    They embraced it

    Google changed the API without stating quite often, at first mildly but then drastically in ways that fundamentally altered the API. Other servers either bent the knee and did whatever google wanted or defederate.

    They extended it

    Meanwhile, when google changed their api XMPP users lost the majority of their contact list and the google user saw that their friend whose trying to get them to switch just kept disappearing, and lost their chat history. Why would they move away from their google service if XMPP was so shit? People moved away from XMPP too, of course they did. They couldn’t talk to their contacts.

    In the end, maintaining XMPP got insanely difficult so most servers shut down, and google shut down it’ss XMPP node

    They extinguished it

    Why would Meta do any different? I can’t remember who said it, but that’s the company where the quote “competition is for pussies” comes from

    The decision to federated is the decision to allow them to hold a knife against our wrist. Sure, they could help out, or they could end the competition. This is suicide.

    • Boozilla@lemmy.worldEnglish
      18·
      9 months ago

      Thank you, this explains the risks very well.

      If Meta was acting in good faith, I might be on board with it. But we know they are not.

      As we saw happen with Google, even if they were practicing “don’t be evil”, greed and share prices will always corrupt that original intention.

      Federation protects from many things but not all things. If we federated with Meta it would play out as you describe. If you have a nice bar or restaurant, and then you go into business with the mob, it’s no longer your bar or restaurant. It’s a little bit like that.