this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Currently Reddit has significantly more users than Lemmy. Has that stopped people from signing up to Lemmy? Twitter has has significantly more users than Mastodon since forever. Has that stopped people from signing up for Mastodon? Has it killed Mastodon?
The common error I see in all the "Threads will kill the Fediverse" mania is that it assumes the same people who sign up for Threads would have otherwise signed up for Mastodon/Lemmy/Kdin/etc. 99.9% of them probably never would have. They want something that's easy and just works; and they're willing to let a company profit off their data to have it.
I don’t think those are good comparisons. The point he is trying to make is that when a user joins Lemmy and sees a two gaming subs, one on Lemmy.world and the other on a meta instance with more subscribers, that user will join the meta sub.
I do not want to see only corporations holding the keys to the majority of communities and if they are allowed in that will be their goal. Meta doesn’t give a shit if the 3dprinting sub has quality content, only that it is profitable for them. Corporations will choose profit over the users every time.
People will say “well if it gets bad or they start becoming bad actors then we can drop them” but that will just set us back to where we are right now. I would rather see us grow slow without corporations than fast with them.
The problem is that this doesn't change the outcome.
To use your example, if we federate people will join the meta instance, if we don't federate people won't even know the lemmy.world instance exists, and even if they do they would still join the meta one if it's bigger.
I totally agree with the sentiment, but I yet have to understand how not federating can change the outcome
The only way smaller instances can thrive and make a strong federation is by making the average person start to care more about privacy.
But you can't do that if you can't reach them in the first place
Sorta seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don't type of situation.
That's not what's going to happen. I really don't understand why people on Lemmy are so fussed about this, Meta are not building a lemmy instance, they are building a twitter clone. While yes you can access Threads content through Lemmy that doesn't mean it's going to affect the Lemmy ecosystem. Mastodon is going to be way more affected than Lemmy ever will be.
Just because they are on the Fediverse doesn't mean it will make sense to use their services through all other Fediverse platforms and vice versa. Following an entire Lemmy "sub" on threads will be a shitty experience and Threads doesn't have creation of subs as an option, the only viable equivalent features are user posts.
It's about threads becoming the fediverse by virtue of their size and resources, and then making changes to the protocols which ultimately lock out the actual fediverse. It will be 'fediverse, by Meta' where everything is hosted and run by meta.
Yep, their plan will be to take over the majority of the network, then start adding their own proprietary features and not adding features that the open source devs add, thereby taking control of the software.
And how do you think defederating them will affect that at all?
They can just use their influence and say “here, W3C, add this and that to the protocol”.
How will a small mastodon server with a few thousand users stop that? Defederating them is useless.
Not totally sure, but I don't think that negotiating with Threads on anything at any point is a winning strategy. They'll win every time. Kind of a 'give them an inch they take a mile' situation in my head.
At least by staying separate the user base will have to make a conscious decision about where they want to spend time instead of letting Meta dictate that for them in the future.
It is harmful either way. Not a great situation for fediverse. I wouldn't say defed is useless, it clearly does something. Effective? Not sure.
Federating with them isn't "negotiating" in any way.
Any fear of Threads controlling the protocol is out of our hands, because the protocol isn't in the hands of the Mastodon devs, it's in the hands of W3C. So no matter what Mastodon instances do, it won't affect Threads and W3C.
I think that by not federating with them, we're TAKING AWAY the option for people to make a decision, and forcing the worst possible choice on them. Imagine I want to follow a guy that is really popular on Threads. If Mastodon federates with them, I can decide to make an account on Mastodon and follow the guy from the safety of a network that it not governed by algorithms that promote hate, or I can decide to make a Threads account and follow them there. It's my choice.
But if Mastodon instances do NOT federate with Threads, the only way for me to follow that popular guy is by creating a Threads account and using the Threads app. By not federating, Mastodon removed my ability to choose and forced the worst possible option on me.
We should want MORE people using Mastodon, not fewer people. Let them follow Threads profiles from the safety of Mastodon.
Allowing their platform access to the fediverse is giving them something they want in exchange for access to a larger user base for us. It's a form of trade or negotiation, however you want to look at it it's a choice to exchange something of value.
You're looking short term. The issue here is that Meta is going to be able to destroy the fediverse later, not right away.
People have been repeating these fearmongering ideas, but with nothing concrete.
How is Threads going to destroy the fediverse if we make it easier for people to choose to come to Mastodon?
And how do you think that pushing people towards Threads is going to save the Fediverse?
And, like I said, if the entire protocol that the fediverse runs on is independent of Mastodon, how can Mastodon even stop it?
Did you read the EEE article someone shared?
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=EEE+threads+meta+fediverse+embrace+extend+extinguish
Yes. And it's also not clear how EEE is going to be applied here in this case.
EEE is easy to do when you're adopting something no one uses, like what happened with XMPP.
EEE is not easy to do with something that millions of people use. Look at emails, for example. Emails are still out there.
And let's stick to the example of emails. If every other email server decided to not work with GMail, then 99.99% of users would migrate to GMail and GMail would "win" so hard that emails would cease to exist outside of Google's control.
If you tell people that they can only interact with the hundreds of millions of people out there if they use the popular proprietary tool, they WILL choose the popular proprietary tool. Even if that proprietary tool push hate speech and bad news down their throats. And that's going to kill any chance Mastodon might have had.
That's true email is out there, but it's different because it's an protocol like TCP/UDP, HTTP. Federation is the same way, but the fediverse isn't and unlike SMTP the fediverse will be updated and changed frequently. I read another comment which made me think of this a little differently and now I'm maybe less against, more middle. Luckily we have a living experiment with Lemmy.ml and lemmy.world to see how this pans out.
EXACTLY! It only benefits us because it hugely increases the exposure of the fediverse to the outside world so people who ARE interested can merely jump over. It makes the fediverse more interesting for people like me who can "live" here and access the content I want.
two things:
have you considered that if this happens, once the fediverse's exposure grows it will be thanks to Meta's entrance, then the people that join the fediverse will do so by Meta's means (in this case, Threads. But they can make some more after)? Making them the standard way to access the protocol, gradually making other communities less and less relevant.
I'm not trying to be rude by any means, but honestly, if the content you enjoy is on their platforms, just go there and enjoy it. You can be both there and here.
The exposure is still greater than the zero that currently exists. If only 1% see the stuff from the smaller instances and figure out what's up, they'll jump. That's better than the current near 0. There's not really a scenario where it reduces the activity here any further, only improves it.