Some insights from Alex Stamos that I found quite interesting.
TL:DR;
He predicts the challenges will be as follows:
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Content Moderation: Enforcing actor and behavior-based content moderation will be difficult in the federated environment. The lack of metadata available in Federation makes it harder to stop spammers, troll farms, and abusers.
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Privacy Obligations: With Threads content being pulled down and cached by other servers, it becomes challenging to comply with right-to-data-deletion requirements, such as those imposed by GDPR. The Fediverse lacks mechanisms to enforce content deletion.
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Competing with Other Platforms: Meta may face difficulties in competing and reaching feature-parity with platforms like TikTok and Twitter while being bound by the feature set of ActivityPub.
Thoughts?
while being bound by the feature set of ActivityPub.
So this is when they’ll start adding features exclusive to their instance. Does it sound familiar?
Those are good points. Don’t implement ActivityPub and avoid the problem all together.
I’m wondering what their motivation was for building it so that it could join the fediverse. I guess they recognize that the fediverse is the future, and they want their hand in that space.
To prevent anti-trust suits. There’s a reason meta never bought Twitter even though it could many times over, they’d be brought to court for having the top three social media platforms. If they were going to enter this space they needed something to point to and say they aren’t a monopoly.
It’s open source so the base code of it is already there and it lets them attract users by already having content available. They probably saw an opportunity with Twitter going to shit, and had to push a viable product as fast as possible.
The solution to these challenges will probably be to de-federate from everything once they have successfully challenged twitter.
This makes sense to me. But why would they want to defederate? I get the whole EEE thing, to an extent, but how would defederating accomplish that as it would simply disconnect them from a big world.
- get on federated thing
- use corporate brand recognition and raw capital to get lots of users onto your instance of the federated thing
- lots and lots and lots of users
- “realize” that most of your users are only talking to each other, and maybe less than 10% is happening over federation
- (of course they are, you deployed all those resources to get as many users as possible)
- feel free to make things hard for the rest of the network along the way by being generally unstable for federated instances, since you represent such a huge number of users the rest of the network will cater to your broken nonsense
- leave federated network, citing “technical challenges” and aforementioned mostly-local-posting, causing everyone not on your instance to just mysteriously stop posting from the perspective of most users who aren’t keeping up with what seems like a bunch of nerd drama
this is, in essence, what happened to XMPP with Google
Do we “nerds” who care about the freedom of the fediverse care whether we can or cannot integrate with a big corporation full of users that don’t care about freedom? I suppose the fediverse is nice in part because it’s users are likely to be more technically literate and motivated than your average Instagram scroller.
From what little I’ve seen of threads after its rollout, no, I really can’t say I’d be looking forward to it. Almost every comment I read here is interesting and civil, and meta’s clientele don’t tend to have a lot of overlap with “people I want near me.” Threads is only a few days old, but initially looks no different and I just don’t want that kind of bullshit back in my life. I forgot what it was like without it.
If it were up to me, honestly? What I would like when meta intentionally or not eventually begins acting unstable around non-meta instances, is for that to be their problem. I would like the fediverse as it is to focus on itself and its own business and bugs instead of acting as Meta’s nanny the way XMPP did, and if they have problems seeing the rest of our content and federating their subscription-only metaflorps, they are able to join us where they’ll be more free anyway.
Their goal is to consume the fediverse. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
The fediverse needs to collectively defederate with Meta the second it dips its toes in the water. If we allow it to metastasize here, we’re done.
But why do they want to consume the fediverse?
The fedidb.org site says the fediverse has ~10m MAUs (a lot of which are probably already on Meta)
Threads got like 10m users on day 1.
It would be such a small increase in users/content for them to consume and most of the people here block ads anyway, so I feel like we’re their worst demographic.
The term “nip it in the bud” comes to mind
Threats are easier to squash when they’re small. We’re a direct competitor to Meta and similar services - a tiny one at the moment, but the potential for growth makes us a target. XMPP vs Google was a comparable scale. They weren’t more than a blip on Google’s radar either, but that didn’t stop Google from destroying them, and that all kicked off exactly the same way Meta is currently setting the stage. We can learn from history, or sit back and hope it won’t repeat itself… my vote is for the former.
