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:
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.
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.
did not know about XMPP… thanks lol
To be clear, the issue that many people have with Threads is not that Meta can’t be trusted with our data. It’s true, but that’s not the main issue. The main issue is that there is no reason for Threads to try to federate with us unless they are trying to kill the Fediverse.
Meta is a big company, they can attract users on their own and support their own ecosystem. Isn’t it strange that they would try to federate with us? We are much smaller in comparison, and we won’t help their user activity just simply because we are much fewer in number compared to the users on Threads. The only reasonable explanation is that Threads is trying to federate with us because they are pre-emptively trying to kill the Fediverse before it becomes a serious competitor.
This is a very standard practice for tech companies, so much so that it has its own name: EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). If a tech company notices an up-and-coming potential competitor, they will adopt the same technology as the competitor by passing it off as a partnership (embrace).
Then, they’ll slowly start introducing changes to the technology, and they’ll introduce those changes in such a way that it’s intentionally difficult for the competitor to implement something similar (extend). This could be anything like making an extension to the ActivityPub protocol that only works with a Threads account (proprietary extensions) or publishing the change but intentionally obfuscating the documentation for that change, so that the competitor’s implementation is buggy (sabotage). This all occurs behind the scenes, so the users will start to wonder why the competitor seems so buggy and slow. They start to switch to Threads because it’s more stable and fast, not realizing that the whole reason why Threads appears more stable is due to sabotage.
Then, once the competitor has developed a bad enough reputation and once enough users have jumped ship, Threads will defederate. The sudden loss of users and the bad reputation that the competitor picked up during the “partnership” will destroy the competitor so much that they will never fully recover (extinguish).
If a big tech company comes to you with a partnership deal and it’s not apparent what exactly they’re getting from the deal, you can generally be sure that they’re only offering because they want to destroy your brand. I don’t trust Threads.
The main issue is that there is no reason for Threads to try to federate with us unless they are trying to kill the Fediverse.
There is. The EU has been going after them recently, so they presumably want an excuse that they tried to interoperate.
That article is from July 2023. I’m not sure if there have been any updates from Threads regarding actually making federation a reality.
Personally, I’m in the camp that wants to keep threads the hell away from Lemmy. However, I’m still kinda curious to see how threads would mesh with parts of the fediverse, and lemmy.world seems like a good server to have that experiment because they’re large enough to not get completely overwhelmed.
Sh.itjust.works and Lemm.ee have preemptively defederated Threads, so there are already good options for those of us who don’t want to interact with them.
My understanding is that Threads won’t have a direct impact on Lemmy because out integration with micro-blogging services is… awkward and fairly unidirectional. However, if they make a play for the ActivityPub protocol then we may all be in trouble.
lemmy.world seems like a good server to have that experiment because they’re large enough to not get completely overwhelmed
I tend to think the opposite. Being federated with the largest instance means more power they can exert against the fediverse. I don’t think it will bode well.
You’re not wrong, that danger does concern me. But I also think the fediverse culture is pretty strong in its own right; there’s a lot of us here who won’t stand for being abused or marginalized by a big corporation.
The XMPP situation shares some parallels, but also some major differences which possibly made that community easier to break up compared to what we have built here.
I hope you’re right. I’m just thankful that the instances I’m on won’t federate with Threads.
Out of curiosity, is sh.itjust.works federating them?
Edit: No
Absolutely not, our users voted resoundingly against it.
Nice!
What specific differences save us from the same fate?
To be honest, I don’t have enough familiarity with XMPP to know for sure.
But in our case, the vast majority of Lemmings made a conscious decision to leave Reddit in response to the API changes or similar concerns of corporate greed and poor user experience. For that reason, I would expect this group to share certain attitudes towards corporate infiltration and dismantling of the network.
As far as I know, XMPP users would have been a more diverse group ideologically, and thus much easier to divide and conquer. Additionally, a messaging application is a much less social/communal experience compared to a forum like Lemmy, so it makes more sense that individuals would slowly drift away from something like that compared to Lemmy imo
I hope people don’t downvote this. It’s just a dude sharing their opinion
Thanks :)
Hey there, welcome to Lemmy and the Fediverse! Yes, many of us are passionate and have principles we stick to stubbornly. Still, I think you will find a lot of reasonable and enjoyable discussion despite a sprinkling of trolls like any social network.
Personally I am trying to keep myself separate from anything Meta/Facebook so @[email protected] is not going to talk to any family members that may be on Threads. Maybe if I make a separate public account on another server or ActivityPub service with my real identity then I will.
I do think it is a positive thing that a massive company like Meta looks at ActivityPub as a relevant player/competitor in the social media sphere. It gives the Fediverse as a whole credibility and recognition.
You will hear the argument of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, I agree with it but I won’t elaborate on it as has been by other replies. It’s a real risk in my mind, that the Fediverse becomes co-opted by Meta, Google, Reddit, or any group of big companies that start dictating the rules and drive small servers out of relevance, except more splintered than before. Kinda like email where small independent servers get 3rd class treatment, even if the owner did everything to secure and spoof-proof it.
So yeah, I’m happy with the size we are with my fellow anonymous Lemmy nerds and shitposters, and maybe besides more niche community participation, things are going nicely for the most part. I have no need for Threads but I recognize that it comes with both benefits but also threats to the free (as in freedom, not beer) and open Fediverse.
This post, along with your bio, makes you seem like a marketing bot, just saying…
