this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023

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Fediverse

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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.

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From the CEO of Mastodon: What to know about Threads (blog.joinmastodon.org)

submitted 1 year ago by developerjustin@kbin.social to c/fediverse@kbin.social

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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.

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[–] nostalgicgamerz@kbin.social 65 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

S̶̶̶o̶̶̶.̶.̶.̶.̶i̶̶̶t̶̶̶ ̶s̶̶̶o̶̶̶u̶̶̶n̶̶̶d̶̶̶s̶̶̶ ̶l̶̶̶i̶̶̶k̶̶̶e̶̶̶ ̶M̶̶̶a̶̶̶s̶̶̶t̶̶̶o̶̶̶d̶̶̶o̶̶̶n̶̶̶ ̶c̶̶̶h̶̶̶a̶̶̶n̶̶̶g̶̶̶e̶̶̶d̶̶̶ ̶t̶̶̶h̶̶̶e̶̶̶i̶̶̶r̶̶̶ ̶m̶̶̶i̶̶̶n̶̶̶d̶̶̶ ̶o̶̶̶n̶̶̶ ̶n̶̶̶o̶̶̶t̶̶̶ ̶w̶̶̶a̶̶̶n̶̶̶t̶̶̶i̶̶̶n̶̶̶g̶̶̶ ̶t̶̶̶o̶̶̶ ̶h̶̶̶a̶̶̶v̶̶̶e̶̶̶ ̶c̶̶̶o̶̶̶m̶̶̶m̶̶̶u̶̶̶n̶̶̶i̶̶̶c̶̶̶a̶̶̶t̶̶̶i̶̶̶o̶̶̶n̶̶̶s̶̶̶ ̶w̶̶̶i̶̶̶t̶̶̶h̶̶̶ ̶M̶̶̶e̶̶̶t̶̶̶a̶̶̶ ̶a̶̶̶t̶̶̶ ̶a̶̶̶l̶̶̶l̶̶̶.̶.̶.̶.̶s̶̶̶h̶̶̶i̶̶̶t̶̶̶ ̶ ̶
I made a mistake, it was Fosstodon. They told Meta to fuck off. https://hub.fosstodon.org/assets/images/meeting-with-meta-email.webp

Mastodon is 100% a competitor to #Meta, and if I were #Mastodon, I would watch my back since everything Meta does is only for the benefit (or the endgame is) for themselves and their market share. Best case scenario would for Meta to extinguish Mastodon and have everyone go to #threads.

I do not understand why Mastedon is downplaying the very likely scenario of Meta EEE'ing the shit out of ActivityPub once they get people to migrate to Threads

[–] slicedcheesegremlin@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Whelp, time to pack up I guess. Mastodon is the biggest player in the fediverse right now, so if Meta EEE's us then the fediverse as a concept is doomed.

[–] ChemicalRascal@kbin.social 23 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We have the foreknowledge of seeing EEE happen with XMPP/Google Chat, now. We can fight back against EEE against ActivityPub as it actually happens, with instances defederating with Meta and so on, when they start actually taking those negative actions. It's gonna be fine.

[–] slicedcheesegremlin@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Can we actually fight back, though? most of the people using the Fedi are on Mastodon, primarily coming from places like Twitter and Reddit because of the recent drama. The biggest complaint new people have is about how complicated Masto and other fediverse services are to get into for people who aren't tech savvy, between choosing different instances and figuring out how to use them. Meanwhile, Meta provides a familiar, convenient experience from a brand they already know, even with its horrible reputation. Then when 90% of "fediverse" users are on Threads instead of the rest of the fedi, they'll announce that they are dropping support for ActivityPub and there will only be a few thousand people left elsewhere to mourn it.

[–] Eggyhead@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it’s worth noting that many more of us are aware of EEE than in the past, and while meta is very well known, it’s also kind of infamous. While some services have brand loyalty, meta kind of has a mix of brand apathy or brand repulsiveness to a lot of people. I think the most loyalty you might find would be in people who purchase into the quest ecosystem, or are avid users of Instagram.

I think enough of us are aware of the circumstances that when Meta eventually does start taking steps towards the “extension” phase, they’re going to get called out immediately, and communities are going to better able to resist than in the past.

[–] slicedcheesegremlin@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I would agree if they didn't already shovel in 10 million people from instagram in the past few hours, and you cant leave without deleting your facebook and instagram accounts and everything you have invested in them. They gained in the past few hours more people than the entire Fediverse has gained over the course of several years.

[–] Eggyhead@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

I think most people are here because we don't really like groups like Meta. We existed before, and I believe we can persist without. Meta is going to have Facebook/instagram/whatsapp integration in threads that will require us to visit their site and/or link accounts to view. I think we might as well just defederate at that point.

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[–] MoogleMaestro@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

We just have to EEE them back. It will be a like a classic anime beam war.

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not aware that Eugen ever said that he wouldn't deal with Meta. Maybe he did, but I'm not aware of it.

The pushback on Mastodon hasn't been by Mastodon gGmbH. It's been by smaller instance admins.

[–] nostalgicgamerz@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I made a mistake, it was Fosstodon.

https://hub.fosstodon.org/assets/images/meeting-with-meta-email.webp

Which means that they probably proposed the same offer to Mastodon and they likely accepted.

[–] HeartyBeast@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

That’s a really hot take. It could be that Eugene - exactly as he says, thinks wide adoption of ActivityPub is a hood thing and that federation is robust enough to handle any potential threat from Threads - which isn’t even federating yet.

Why jump straight to ‘the guy is clearly corrupt and has taken money from Meta’?

[–] asteroidrainfall@kbin.social 13 points 1 year ago

It’s because you can’t “kill” a the AP protocol. XMPP didn’t go away when Messenger and GChat removed support for it, it just went back to how it was before hand, a fraction of tech enthusiasts using it for private communication. It would probably be the same with AP. A separate collection of sites using it to federate information.

… even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

Granted this leaves out how Google used it’s influence to control and stagnate the XMPP protocol, but that’s another can of worms.

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[–] Arotrios@kbin.social 59 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Hmm... sounds a bit too idealistic to be true, especially given how Facebook has acted in the past. I appreciate his hope for the future, but I think he severely underestimates the lengths to which FB will go to monetize and control users on their platforms.

Here's the scenario I don't like. Threads scrapes my OC on a federated server, then reposts it to their users with advertisements. Now, not only has FB taken my OC without getting my permission or even informing me, they're now garnering profit from it. If this were a print publication, this would plainly be copyright theft. And if I want to remove my content that's now hosted on Threads without my permission, there's no possible way for me to do so - I can delete the post and hope their federated server does the same, but given how hard they make it to delete a FB account, I'm not terribly optimistic.

It's no wonder #threads isn't launching in Europe - there's no way in hell this kind of thing is even remotely GDPR compliant.

[–] Alto@kbin.social 20 points 1 year ago

Anyone willing to give Meta even the slightest bit of the benefit of the doubt is at best incredibly naive and at worst an outright idiot.

[–] BobQuasit@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That's an interesting point. Can anyone take your original content and repost it to make money? As I understand it, anything you create is theoretically copyrighted at the moment you created. You're not required to file a copyright, at least not in the United States.

[–] Itty53@kbin.social 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure they can. Stack overflow is one example. Any business operating on user driven content will be culpable. When you agree to the EULA and it tells you "what you post here belongs to us and we grant you a license to publish it yourself", you're signing over ownership of your content in exchange for a license to replicate it. That's how social media all works, all the EULAs work that way. FOSS is no different.

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[–] Arotrios@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

US copyright starts at the moment of creation, but the issue here is really enforcement. To get a copyright enforced, you have to bring a civil suit, which is considerably expensive in terms of both time and money. If you're going after a company as big as FB, your expense dramatically increases while your likelihood of getting a favorable judgment drops. And even then, you're probably only looking at getting the content taken down, not a monetary award, because in this scenario it would be near impossible to tell how much ad revenue your specific content generated for FB, or how much was lost to FB if you were getting ad traffic revenue from your content on another platform that's now going to FB.

While these potential problems exist with or without FB in the picture, as any instance owner could theoretically do the same thing, the difference in scale combined with how FB treats its users (cattle) is what's making my alarm bells go off. There's so much potential for abuse, with very little benefit to the existing users of the Fediverse.

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[–] hiyaaaaa23@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Look I don’t want to be combative here, and my sincere apologies if this response comes off that way but here goes

IMHO this is already the way activitypub works. Platforms that choose to federate, are able to pool their posts and the like. And yes instances can make money off of content posted on other instances. That’s not a bug it’s a feature.

On the other hand, meta sucks and I’m not sure if I’d really want to federate with them either. So like, idk lol, just spitballing

[–] Halogen2744@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago

100%. The open and public nature of the fediverse is something everyone should be considering every single time they post on a federated platform. I don't want to federate with meta because ew , but it would be absurd to think that a public platform like this isn't gonna get scraped to hell anyways.

[–] Roundcat@kbin.social 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

TLDR: Mastodon trying their damndest to rationalize taking the money.

[–] HeartyBeast@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That's not actually the tl;dr in my opinion, but others should decide for themselves.

Whats your source on "taking the money", by the way?

[–] comedy@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Did they take any money? Genuinely asking, hadn't heard they did...

[–] meat_popsicle@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If they did the contract would be under an NDA. No way for us to find that shit out - you just have to watch the enshittification happen as the early birds get paid.

[–] admiralteal@kbin.social 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Meta is public. A transaction like that could not be done in secret.

[–] meat_popsicle@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

Meta is a publicly traded company - that doesn’t mean they have business arrangements the outside world doesn’t know about. They’re held to public reporting obligations and have a Board of Directors hand-picked by Zuck (since he still has the majority control of voting shares).

A transaction like that is done in secret all the time, each and every day.

[–] Sinnerman@kbin.social 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Will Meta embrace-extend-extinguish the ActivityPub protocol?

There are comparisons to be made between Meta adopting ActivityPub for its new social media platform and Meta adopting XMPP for its Messenger service a decade ago. There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now.

Yes, 5 years from now when Threads abandons ActivityPub, you will be 5 years behind Threads. That is not a good outcome.

XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

Mastodon is not exactly a household name.

I really hope for the best. And it's not like anyone can stop Meta from making Threads and enabling ActivityPub. But this reasoning is not very convincing.

[–] nostalgicgamerz@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago

large instances like Mastedon and Lemmy.world can defederate....Mastedon already sold out so this could already be a lost cause. If they had any fucking decency they would have refused to work with them in any capacity

[–] Uprise42@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

I don’t feel like this is a 1-1 comparison with the XMPP issue.

With XMPP users joined servers and then Google started working with the protocol allowing those users contact books to increase by hundreds overnight. Then when Google dropped, many people built work connections through those chats and still wanted to talk so they migrated to Google as it was the simpler platform.

But fediverse isn’t about talking to individuals for the most part. Mastadon gets the closest, but even then it’s about following updates and quickly getting ideas out to large groups, not the 1-1 communication of a chat. Fediverse is mostly about talking in communities. When threads defederates after getting a bunch of users, those users will lose entire communities instead of just a couple individuals that can switch platforms. And asking a community of hundreds to move to your preferred social isn’t how it works. People go towards communities, not companies. When threads defederates (which will happen) they will lose members, many communities will drop in membership, but I think the fediverse will be in the same spot after that it would be in if threads never existed. Not the same as today. But if we ignore threads and try to project the growth out 5 years. That’s where I think we’ll be if threads defederates in 5 years.

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[–] stopthatgirl7@kbin.social 14 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

[–] BedSharkPal@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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.

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[–] SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it’s more they’re trying to make a Twitter-killer then kill Mastodon from the inside.

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.

[–] stopthatgirl7@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago

It also gives them an edge over Bluesky, since no where else is using the Bluesky protocol yet, whereas ActivityPub has all these sites also using it and populated.

Threads wants to be there place where everyone is happening and everyone feels like they need to be, like Twitter was and Bluesky is starting to be. Mastodon was never that. Mastodon, to them, is a tool to use against Twitter and Bluesky for that pop culture spot, not a rival.

[–] HidingCat@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Eh, so it's not running on ActivityPub? I got the impression it was.

[–] DopamineDaydreams@kbin.social 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They're implementing it, but no it currently isn't using the ActivityPub protocol

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[–] 0xtero@kbin.social 7 points 1 year ago

XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.

That's either a really tasty self-irony or just delusional. I really hope no one thinks Mastodon is anything but a nerd circle.

[–] rodhlann@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Will a large platform like Meta joining Mastodon overwhelm smaller servers?

This could be interesting for Kbin, it's true that Mastodon shouldn't see an influx of Threads only content, but the Microblog for Kbin may be overwhelmed, since it's followed by tag, at least how I'm using it, not user

[–] EnglishMobster@kbin.social 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Kbin tags work the same way. Every person you see in the microblog tag is directly followed by someone on Kbin.

I have purposely been going out and following interesting Mastodon accounts from Kbin to ensure that they're being brought over into the Kbin feed and put into the proper magazines.

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[–] Kichae@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Tags aren't followable entities. You still need to follow individual "actors", and that means a user or a "group actor" like a kbin magazine, lemmy community, or peertube channel.

The hashtag "following" done by kbin magazines is just a saved search from the microblog stream.

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