There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.
There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.
I’m still pretty much “wait and see” on this. A lot of folks are predicting gloom and doom, but also have a lot of good points. Meta shouldn’t be trusted in general, but they also haven’t done anything yet - they haven’t even implemented ActivityPub yet.
I think it’s more they’re trying to make a Twitter-killer then kill Mastodon from the inside. They want people on their site so they can show them ads, and they want to get those people from Twitter. ActivityPub integration is another feature they can use to get attention.
A company exists to make money - period. I struggle to see why Meta making money off ActivityPub is a good thing.
There’s just no good reason to have a profit motive in social media when it simply doesn’t need to be there.
Exactly! In that regard, it’s like health care. The profit motive can only harm the public.
This is the answer. They aren’t stupid, they know that if they just spin up a Twitter clone, nobody will use it. They need a reason to exist. Honestly I don’t think they give a single shit about Mastodon or killing it. But what ActivityPub does, is get them an instant content base. And if they are building their own AI, it’s a whole lot of live conversation for them to train it on.
See, that’s what I don’t understand. ActivityPub means nothing to the vast majority of potential Threads users. There’s no way that Meta is going to use ActivityPub to gain users; all they have to do is what they HAVE done, leverage Instagram. The only thing that makes sense to me is that they may be hoping that federation will allow them to get around the EU’s limitations.
But even that doesn’t really make sense. Zuck doesn’t really care that much about regulations. He breaks them all the time. Which leaves me with the question, why ActivityPub? What aren’t we seeing?