There are lots of people on there I would like to follow, but they wont be joining the fediverse and I don't want to make a Threads account myself either.
Lots of illustrators and writers have Threads and Instagram because it's where the money is. They rely on that kind of exposure to sell and show their work. Following from Mastodon without a Threads account would be awesome.
Not to mention that many Mastodon users are ridiculously "purists" saying that no ad or sell should be on the network, ever, and are actively hostile to the small guys trying to make a living here. I agreed that big corps can fuck off because they overdo ads, but the small guy selling his weird contraptions or custom phone cases should see Mastodon as an alternative. But the truth is that they won't.
People are delusional. Most books sell less than 5000 copies their entire lifetime. Most illustrators are LARPing freelancers who get paid in exposure.
People keep parroting that Threads will kill us all but won't explain how it could happen to the fediverse. As in, actual steps. Because Flipboard federated and I'm not flooded with news posts. Mastodon is used for Nazi instances and I'm not flooded by Nazi content, even if the maintainer don't block that particular instace due to not knowing it exists.
No, XMP is not a valid example. It requires specific people to be on that specific platform for you to connect with them, like iMessage and WhatsApp. The fediverse is nothing like that.
Can someone explain exactly how EEE will happen? Technically? Other than FUD?
EDIT: thank you all for the replies, there's definitely some good points that are worth considering that I couldn't find elsewhere.
Threads will want to implement post reactions to maintain parity with Facebook.
Threads expands the ActivityPub spec to include reactions.
Now, every other instance will not be compatible with reactions. Users complain they cannot see reactions.
Admins have two choices now:
Refuse to implement reactions because they are not part of the spec. Users leave and join threads.
ActivityPub adds reactions to the standard, all instances must now support reactions. Meta has now started dictating the spec.
I feel the XMP fears do have some sentiment, and it's really a matter of how the broad username interprets these issues (including the Thread users which would be family and friends).
I don't think so. There are tons of ActivityPub implementations out there already that don't even support all parts of the official spec (Lemmy can't display attached images, for example). There are also implementations that have tacked on additional functionality beyond the official spec (again, Lemmy's downvotes).
It's a very flexible protocol that allows developers to pick and choose what features they want to implement in their services.
i just want to point out that, in the same way XMP is not a valid example of EEE, neither is Flipboard a good example of a massive megacorp federating. Flipboard’s algorithms have never incited violence in Myanmar and that makes 100% of the difference.
my concern is not EEE, and I agree that i don’t get why that’s the focus.
my concern is that we are dealing with Meta—an absolutely massive, soulless corporation which has shown dozen upon hundreds of times that it will prioritizethegrowth of its shareholders’ paycheck well before the afterthought of caring if its algorithms end up wreaking addiction and violence.
call that FUD if you want, i call it learning from well-documented experience.
Again, you're not actually making an argument about meta doing anything to make the fediverse worse than it is, you're not even arguing that metas actions in those other situations are directly applicable and will happen here, you're just saying "look at these bad things that Meta did before, sure other bad things must happen".
That is the literal textbook definition of a FUD argument.
And yet you haven't explained "how", you repeated a few buzzwords. If they want to "steal data" they are able to by simply creating their own instance.
What specifically will they do / can they do, to tank the fediverse?
Others have given technical ways fb can eee, but I'm more concerned about rapid uncontrolled growth and corporate political sanitization.
Say you have a community dedicated to pointing out corporate greed. Your community federates with threads and wow it's really taken off suddenly you have gone from hundreds of up votes to tens of thousands of them. Wow this is great, but huh, why has my post about Facebook only got 3 up votes. Huh why does the word communism spawn a 200 comment chain of alt righters yelling. Why is there an obviously sponsored post at the top. Why is everyone saying "unalived" and using 🍉 instead of 🇵🇸.
It's just not in their interest to be a normal part of the fediverse. It's in their interest to compete with mastodon. Mastodon is not competitive because it doesn't have billions of dollars in its budget.
EEE works the way it always has. Add features not present in Mastodon that only work on threads. People want those features and join threads, Mastodon users are missing out. Long time Mastodon users create a second Threads account so they can interact properly with their friends, and eventually abandon their old Mastodon account.
I used Mastodon but the same applies to firefish etc, any fediverse technology that will interact with threads. It probably won't impact Lemmy.
Same. I’m glad the ‘default’ instances are federated, since I want to follow a bunch of folks on threads. And I’m glad that I dont have to give up my personal info to zuck to do that.
I don't need any sort of isolationism pushed on me. I wouldn't sign up for an email provider that blocks GMail because "we're not corpo bootlickers", or a phone provider that only lets me call the coolest fellow comrades. If an instance wants to be its own little island with its own ideology, I'm cool with that, but it's not for me - I'm looking for an instance that behaves more like an un-opinionated public utility.
i think i’d 100% agree with you if:
a) the fediverse wasn’t majority public facing
b) meta’s past failures hadn’t impacted the material conditions and safety of real people
i get your comparisons to gmail and phone providers, but to me those two differences are fundamental. gmail is private, your phone is private, but social media is public and can be used to stir up massive misinformation campaigns, harrassment, or calls to violence.
on the same level, if any evidence that gmail or my phone provider had willingly participated in calls to violence which resulted in rape and murder, i also would want that institution to be excluded in order to guarantee the safety of my local instance’s members as well as to stop letting them profit from my existence on a federated platform.
these are the key differences that i am taking into account when i call for not federating with meta on a majority scale. what are your thoughts on them?
I think these are fair points. and I can't say I blame anyone for wanting Meta/FB out of their life entirely. I see value in both options - the option of having maximum connectivity to others, and the option of having only parties that are considered to be in good ethical standing. And I'm glad the fediverse can offer both options to everyone. For me personally, having communications cut between users based on who is hosting their instance is a last resort.
I see your point but I think you might not know all the reasons for defederation. There is nothing wrong with wanting to interact with people on other platforms of course.
However, Meta is a huge company and it is not in Meta's interest to have an open fediverse with many diverse platforms. Platforms like instagram are notoriously predatory walled gardens. They grow until there is tons of people on them and they have a quasi-monopoly, then they crank up ads, force people to make an account and/or download an app to see content. Their content cannot be seen from elsewhere.
If their services have been closed off in walled gardens until now, why would they suddenly shift and want to support ActivityPub? Mastodon is big but not big enough that people feel they are missing out by being on other platforms. I doubt they expect to attract significantly more users that way. They want to create a way to become part of the fediverse through their platform. Given the sheer amount of money Meta has, they will then make Threads the most bestest and easiest way to do microblogging on the fediverse. Find a mastodon instance? ugh what a hassle, just join Threads. Then they can start adding features that mastodon and firefish don't have. People will switch to threads for these features, and voila, the age old strategy of embrace-extend-extinguish is done.
Even if we assume that is not their motive, the fediverse is about open, democratic and collaborative social media. Those values are directly opposed by Meta's entire business model (and their business itself which is generating shareholder profits). Now if some small company was part of the fediverse who cares, but Meta is a huge behemoth and IMO we're better off building a world without them, rather than inviting them into it to compete against largely volunteer-built software. Let's learn from the past.
honestly my threads feed is pretty good and i havent noticed too many issues with the things that plagued twitter. the trans community is pretty big on threads too which is nice.
i honestly don't get the hate. i love the fact that i wont need two apps anymore to see the more mainstream people i used to follow on twitter. tje worst part about twitter going under is the fragmentation.
I understand you, but I specifically went to lemmy to not have any of that bullshit from Musk or Zuck or Spez. Facebook is a toxic dumpster fire(on purpose because money) Twitter is a toxic dumpster fire (because Musk is an asshole). Reddit is basically the same but the ceo is still an asshole. And I am sure that after a few years threads will follow this trend soon.
People keep parroting this but won't explain how it could happen to the fediverse. As in, actual steps. Because Flipboard federated and I'm not flooded with news posts. Mastodon is used for Nazi instances and I'm not flooded by Nazi content, even if the maintainer don't block that particular instace due to not knowing it exists.
Care to explain exactly how EEE will happen?
EDIT: thank you for those who took the time to write a clear and technical responses, there are really good point worth considering that a didn't read anywhere else.
I just see so many disadvantages on running your own instance:
First and foremost, you need to rent a webserver and a domain.
Then, you need to setup SSH and TLS, and to configure your server as to lessen the chances of you getting hacked/DOSed, and setup some failsafes in case someone still manages to hack you.
Then you finally install the Mastodon/Pleroma/whatever and configure it to your liking.
And after all of that, many issues may still pop up at any time. What if your instance can't federate with others? And what if you get DDOSed? Lots of things can happen, and none of them seems fun.
I did the same. I had been donating to Ruud since just before reddit destroyed the 3rd party apps. I stopped that and moved to lemm.ee for now. Chose them because they are defederated from Threads, allow downvotes, and community creation.
Edit: Was unhappy with lemm.ee due to their federation with tankies. Feddit.de is the only instance I could find that was defederated from Threads, lemmgrad, and hexbear.
I think because their instances don’t have enough content or interactions. Including threads isn’t necessarily going to fix it, it’ll just provide threads with more content that’s not on threads. People who want to use these admins instances are already using it, threads users aren’t going to migrate simply because these admins have included threads. In short, you’ve let in the fucking Trojans haven’t you? Did you let in the Trojans? Because I think that’s what you’ve done, you nimrods.
If you mean lemmy.world, Lemmy doesn't display microblog posts unless they're posted to a community, which is a confusing process. Threads isn't fully federating right now anyway though. Even if you're on Mastodon, you'll only be a able to see posts from specific Threads accounts who have had federation enabled, which is mostly just a few engineers iirc.
Threads isn’t fully federated, meaning currently there aren’t a lot of Thread posts on the Fediverse. Also, since Lemmy isn’t like Threads (compared to mastodon), you won’t really see any posts. Overall Threads is mostly a Mastodon problem (though lemmy is also effected) and you probably won’t experience a big difference
Limited means the instance has done something not quite to the level of total defederation, but still limits the presence of Threads users. For example, making it so you can only see a Threads user if you actively search for and follow them, removing all Threads content from the global feed by default, preventing Threads users from following your users, etc.
"Fedipact" means that the admin of that instance has signed on to the informal agreement of the same name between instances that pledged to defederate from Threads preemptively.