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:
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.
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.
https://sh.itjust.works/post/11308397
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