Threads has begun testing federation over ActivityPub. And they have blocked two important servers I administrate. The first server is the Mostr Bridge. The Mostr Bridge connects ActivityPub and Nostr together, so people can communicate across protocols. The second server is Spinster.xyz, which is arguably the largest independent feminist community online.
The problems have to do with people not liking Meta. I’m getting an increasingly strong feeling that the goalposts shall be placed wherever they are needed.
Which I suppose explains the tonal whiplash of going from people raging that not enough people were defederating from Meta to raging that Meta is defederating from the usual suspects in less time than it took to get through the Christmas leftovers.
Not that I particularly like Meta. All social media was a mistake, if you ask me. But still.
I thought it was because of the troubled history of these big corporations either destroying or exploiting every project, app, or platform they get their claws into.
But you’re telling me that people just randomly dislike Meta for no reason, so I guess you must be right that they have no good reason to do so /s
spoiler
But seriously, how much are they paying you lot? I don’t think anyone is actually buying your bullshit, and I could use the money…
Oh, no they don’t “randomly” dislike Meta. They have very good reasons to dislike Meta. I dislike Meta. I abandoned all my Meta accounts ages ago, never looked back. Like I said, all social media was a mistake.
What I’m saying is that the general tenor of the conversation is to actively dislike Meta, then look for ways to justify Meta federating being bad for everybody else. It’s not to think about the consequences of Meta federating and then deciding if it’s convenient or not.
I mean, my personal take is that Meta social media sucks, so I’d much rather access the people I know in Threads safely from Mastodon than from a Threads account, if we’re gonna put the cards on the table. I don’t need to like Meta for that. In fact, that’s a stance entirely built on not wanting to have to engage with Meta’s platform to reach the people in Meta’s platform.
And hey, it’d been a while since people accused me of being a paid shill for anybody. That’s some holiday nostalgia for you.
reason for disliking facebook is same for defederating
do you learn from history
real life always exist
Indeed. People keep warning “it’s just like XMPP!” And thus revealing that they had no idea what the situation with XMPP was like. Google didn’t kill it, it died on its own.
What’s actually happening is people start from the position “Meta is bad”, then search around until they can find a thing to plug into that as a thing they can say to justify it. Well, maybe Meta is bad, but you’re not going to prove it or adequately defend against them if that’s your approach to figuring it out. You’re just going to Chicken Little yourself.
XMPP works well and the community is actively developing server and clients. There aren’t any big corporations funding it anymore that’s all. Still the best instant messaging protocol in 2023.
Well that just furthers the basic point.