Mastodon founder touts Threads' federation, saying it makes his X rival 'a far more attractive option'

I'm pasting an old comment of mine from the official lemmy.world post discussing potential future federation with threads/meta:

I would like to start by expressing my sincere gratitude and appreciation for the hard work you've done with lemmy.world. But I am strongly opposed to federating with Threads. Please read this comment in full, as I believe it outlines the sentiment and reservations held by many within our community.

I think it might be helpful to use an analogy that I think will help express the feelings of many of those within our community regarding the problem with the "wait and see" approach.

What's to say Threads won't follow in their very well-established footprints under Meta as a company?

If I go to a friend's house and their child spits in my face every time, I don't want to go to my friend's house. I tell them this. The friend again says, "Well this time just might be different, let's just wait and see!" Meanwhile, this kid spits in my face without fail, every chance they get. There is a very consistent and pervasive pattern of this.

Why should I believe this kid won't spit in my face all of a sudden, when they've taken every single chance they could repeatedly, knowing that it was wrong and not caring what repercussions would befall them? Do you really think this kid is going to refrain from spitting in my face this time?

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. -~~Albert Einstein~~ -someone.

Meta/FB have continually demonstrated their core business practices are unethical and that they will continue carrying them out without regard for laws or their users' well-being. There's no reason to wait and see. It's not logical to believe this time will be different.

Threads would bring such a large influx of hateful, racist, violent, bigoted political extremists to the fediverse. They will also do whatever they can to exploit users on this site for their own gain. Their modus operandi has been to exploit their users.

Instead of just conjecture and analogies, I will now provide factual information regarding Meta's practices as a company.

This really should be obvious by now.. but Meta mines and sells their user's information. Just look at the permissions you have to grant them for Threads... That alone should tell you there's no reason to "wait and see." Just look right now. They haven't changed...

FB users have to agree to all sorts of unethical things in the TOS, including giving Meta permission to run unethical experiments on their users without informed consent. Their first published research was where they manipulated users' feeds with positive or negative information, in order to see if it affected their mood. It did, and they successfully induced depression in many of their users!

Meta has played a very key role in spreading misinformation, perpetuating dangerous conspiracy theories, and radicalizing the alt right. This is present across nations, but it certainly contributed heavily to the climate of political extremism that led to a mass of insurrectionists to attempt to overthrow my duly elected government...

I will now turn to an article that surmises well the core practices of Meta as a company:

Elevates disinformation campaigns and conspiracy theories from the extremist fringes into the mainstream, fostering, among other effects, the resurgent anti-vaccination movement, broad-based questioning of basic public health measures in response to COVID-19, and the proliferation of the Big Lie of 2020—that the presidential election was stolen through voter fraud [16];
Empowers bullies of every size, from cyber-bullying in schools, to dictators who use the platform to spread disinformation, censor their critics, perpetuate violence, and instigate genocide;
Defrauds both advertisers and newsrooms, systematically and globally, with falsified video engagement and user activity statistics;
Reflects an apparent political agenda espoused by a small core of corporate leaders, who actively impede or overrule the adoption of good governance;
Brandishes its monopolistic power to preserve a social media landscape absent meaningful regulatory oversight, privacy protections, safety measures, or corporate citizenship; and
Disrupts intellectual and civil discourse, at scale and by design.

I ask you now if you truly believe this is the sort of player you want on the Fediverse? Do you really want to federate lemmy.world with such a blatantly immoral and detrimental corporation?

I have really enjoyed my time here on Lemmy.world and have so greatly appreciated the hard work of you and your team. I have been donating to you to help with the costs of running this instance.

However, federating with Threads contradicts my philosophy and ethical principles, and I will be sadly canceling my donations and finding a new home should we federate with Threads in the future. I firmly believe that most users on lemmy.world share this sentiment. I hope this comment helped express the resistance and fears of our community.

Once again, I appreciate all the work you guys have done. But I respectfully and severely dissent on this issue.

I made this profile picture to those who want to show their support to this cause:
You can also read my post I made for the programming.dev instance here. https://programming.dev/post/497263
- The 2 articles in the linked post were very informative. Thanks for sharing!
Einstein never said that:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/?amp=1
- TIL. Edited my comment to be more accurate.
- And it's a completely false statement, to boot.
Well now you can block instances yourself. So no point in bannkng it for all...

Short sighted mistake. Terrible Idea.

~~Adopt, Extend, Destroy~~ Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. That's the game plan. It's worked so many times in the past.

Embrace Extend Extinguish*
- That's what I was thinking of!
It only works if people stop using Mastodon once Threads stops federating. ActivityPub is dead they will say.
- Yeah and I'm not going to stop using my instance I love it to much, Maybe I will boot up my own personal one if anything. Just glad more people will hopefully understand and can use the Fediverse
They don't need to do that when the fedi is a thousandth of the size of their social networks lol. It's hilarious that you think they need our user base.
- They don't care about the user base we have today. They want to eliminate the potential user base we may have in a decade.
- It's not so much about wanting this user base as it is eliminating potential competition and maybe stamping out a place on the internet where people can freely and openly communicate.
You can't really Embrace, Extend, Extinguish an open standard. Anybody can continue to use the unextended version and that's exactly what would happen if Meta tried it. They can't force servers to update or implement meta-specific features
- You could say the same thing about any EEE strategy against anything not proprietary. However, evidently it works.

Meanwhile tinfoil hats bitching when open standards are being adopted...

We should treat them like any other instance. If they are a good citizen of the Fediverse they stay, otherwise they will be blocked and nothing has changed.
- If they are a good citizen of the Fediverse
  
  They haven't been a good citizen of the internet, why would you even give them a chance?
- Mastodon users can already block entire domains. Unless it's legally required, there's hardly a reason why the admins would need to take the decision away from the users.
Right? You don't have to join or even engage with Threads if you don't want to. Super easy to block an instance. But this brings a massive userbase and serious support to Mastodon. I'm a huge FOSS supporter and this is how the Fediverse not only survives, but thrives and grows - buy in from big players. Otherwise, when X/Twitter inevitably dies, another proprietary app takes its place. We just have to hold them accountable and educate users that there are Fedi apps outside Threads.
Agreed. The entire point of this federation and it is being essentially burned because someone wants to join.

I’ll use a very loose and likely wrong political analogy.

If a right wing group says the left wing are not inclusive and blocking certain people from joining. The left wing denies this and says anyone can join. So a right wing member tries to join and the left wing says “sorry not you”.

Let threads join. Don’t subscribe to any of their communities. Simple.

Honestly? I don't trust Meta, but I like that they're implementing federation.

It will allow me to follow famous people or brands that only have a Threads account through the privacy of my Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever app, so I'm not forced to use Meta's official apps, which are famously riddled with trackers and whatnot.

I didn't think about that. One to many brand marketing. One might even call it.. web 1.0
The fact that this is possible tells me that functionality will be phased out. No shot Meta would leave all that theoretical cash on the table.
Sure but then anyone whose ever interacted with you, outside of Meta, will be susceptible to Meta's privacy issues even if they block you or are only on instances that block threads because their previous comments will be on your content. At least from my understanding, that's how defederating and blocking goes. If I'm wrong, let me know but if not it's going to get hard knowing who we can interact with in the fediverse if they're also interacting with threads.
- It'll look the same way it does interacting with different mastodon instances.

I think we can give facebook/threads the bad end of the bargin IF we have a data protections.

You know how powerful copy-left was for open source? I think we can do the same for Lemmy servers. We can have users agree (formally) that the data on a particular server cannot be used for training llvm's advertisements, marketing profiles, etc, and make it legally binding.

Even if we don't federate with them, Meta can still harvest the data so we should add these protections regardless. Maybe there is already something like this and I'm just unaware of it.

If we do add these protections and we ensure that the largest instance (e.g. Lemmy.world) is community controlled, I think it could work well for bringing more content to Lemmy.

Yep, on a public forum like this we lose very little on privacy by federating with them. What we do stand to lose is comment and post quality, but that’s trivial to fix by simply blocking threads on a personal level.
You can scrape Lemmy instances for training data without even running an instance.
- Yeah, sorry if I'm not great at communicating. That's exactly what I'm trying to point out when I said:
  
  Even if we don't federate with them, Meta can still harvest the data so we should add these protections regardless.

As long as they keep their shitty ads on their side i'm fine with it.

I'm really curious how they will approach this. If you can use threads with any other apps, ads free, won't people just do that?
- Right now, if you want to comment on a non-threads user, you have to leave the app. I doubt this will change unless they've figured out a way to control the flow.

My wish is that we could maybe turn this against facebook(mEtA) and actually get threads users to use other instances. Maybe its possible idk i hope so.

Threads users are basically boomers. They wouldn't understand federation and instances.
- Make it as easy, or preferably easier, to sign up for other instances as it is the threads instance. If we can clear that hurdle, we'd have a chance at getting many of them.

This is an old article but: https://wedistribute.org/2023/08/threads-new-terms-affects-the-fediverse/

I can't find any current stats on threads, but it had a severe cliff drop not long after it launched. Meta’s Twitter rival Threads sees steep drop in daily users by 80 per cent, report says

Total users of the fediverse is about 13 million: https://fediverse.observer/stats

he's not wrong. the migration of the queer community from twitter to threads is great plus i had a great time talking about doctor who over the weekend, it genuinely felt like twitter 2010 again. ive never had that much engagement from mastodon so if federation from threads to mastodon can keep that up, it will be a win win for all users.

if a mastodon instance was fine with hosting libsoftiktok it would swiftly be defederated for lack of moderation by a large amount of instances. No questions asked. No debate. Why is this any different? Do the rules somehow not apply when we're dealing with facebook?

I think federation with Meta will improve Mastodon, and doesn't affect Lemmy too much. Threads users will be able to post to our groups, but the discussion will be mostly within communities on existing servers.

The worry is if the bulk of discussion happens in Meta's space. Yes, people will feel like they are missing out if they are on a Masto server defederated with Meta, but there is enough activity from people outside of that to be engaging. On the Lemmy side, (hypothetically) if Facebook Groups were to become like Lemmy communities, I'd be very concerned that most of the discussion would move away from places like here on lemmy.world and other cool servers to Meta's. Then by the time Meta decides to leave or do something stupid then people will not have a place to go to.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko lauds Threads’ entry into the decentralized social media space, saying the move will make Mastodon — the open source Twitter/X rival — “a far more attractive option.” Mastodon’s app, which is powered by the decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub, has gained more attention in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, a network that’s been since renamed X to reflect Musk’s ambitions to turn the microblogging platform into an everything app encompassing creators, payments, video, live audio, and shopping.

Those unhappy with Twitter’s changes have been scoping out other platforms, including Mastodon, an open source alternative, as well as challengers from other startups like Spill, Spoutible, Post, Bluesky, and others.

Rochko has been largely positive about having the tech giant embrace ActivityPub and decentralized social media, having earlier said, “The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers.”

As the integration goes live, Rochko touted the move as “exciting,” and “huge for Mastodon,” saying in a post on the platform that it’s a “step towards the interoperable social web that we’ve been advocating for.”

In addition, he points out that having access to all Threads users from a Mastodon account makes the app more attractive, considering its other perks.

That same argument is being made by the Mastodon third-party client, Mammoth, backed by Mozilla, which believes that its app will offer a competitive user interface that will be more approachable for newcomers to decentralized social media, and a viable alternative to Threads, including for those users who don’t want to create an account with Meta.

The original article contains 686 words, the summary contains 285 words. Saved 58%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Kumbaya vibe

I hope that it doesn't change the fediverse for the worst. On the one hand there will likely be a lot more willingness for the general populus to dip their toes into the fediverse if meta is adopting it. Lack of fediverse adoption isn't a technical problem but rather an unwillingness to download another app because it isn't the hot new thing. I don't think it will take long for a good chunk of their user base to see that both the threads app and their instance is just objectively a lot worse of an experience than practically anything else you'll see in the fediverse, and it will shed a lot of light on some really great projects and will almost certainly see a lot of growth in specific areas that the fediverse needs it and there will probably be less of a feeling of "shouting into the void" when you post on mastodon, for instance. but I don't agree with the decision to allow meta to federate with us.

A lot of people who argue for meta integrating with the fediverse tend to see this as like, "oooh cringe reddit wojak gatekeeping" And I don't think any of our userbase is trying to gatekeep the fediverse. Ultimately meta is a disgusting company and for profit mega corporations that take advantage of kids don't mix with "ordinary people trying to make a good platform for themselves and others because they can, no strings attached" To put simply, good community is a very delicate thing and a relatively small userbase like the fediverse being exposed to this much toxicity and pressure from a multi billion dollar company that has its own ideas for this platform doesn't seem like something we need to expose ourselves to as a community. Something in particular that bothers me about this (so far, at least) is that meta's ActivityPub "integration" is unidirectional, so as of now it's using the fediverse to effectively just advertise their platform. There is nothing in their roadmap that inherently suggests that they are planning to add polydirectional integration, which sounds like a very meta thing to do. Isn't meta an advertising company ? Aren't there adds on threads ? If threads catches on then so will brands and more advertisers. Will we have a solution to stop ads from appearing on non threads apps? Food for thought. I think it's a bad idea to poison this flowering community. And that's exactly what this decision is, no matter how you look at it.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

The Eternal September is coming, as it always does.

Me too!

I wouldn't mind followers-only federation of Threads. My issue would be that the flow of posts from there (if it reaches the federated timeline anyway) would be a burden for moderation.

I see this going only a few directions:

Threads tries and fails
Threads succeeds, flexes, annexes
Equilibrium, and Mastodon/Lemmy become the social network APIs that connect across (like I wish we'd had when G+ was a thing)

Petition to make mastodon.social and .online defederate from meta

https://change.org/defederatemeta

And of course .world is doing exactly what I expected it to do: it's going along with Threads integration.

And judging from how it's been set up and run to function almost exactly like old Reddit, with corporate censoring, PR-style talk from admins, blatant refusal to address and fix serious problems, and monopolizing Lemmy by herding everyone else under its umbrella instead of letting people migrate to niche servers which was the intent of the fediverse in the first place, it stands to reason the .world admins are either working directly for Threads or being paid off by Meta to do this.

It's time for everyone to just leave and go back to making their own websites again.

That is the beauty of the Fediverse. If you don't like how an instance is run, you can easily switch to another instance in Lemmy 0.19. We need to think of Lemmy instances as countries with their own laws, culture, and policies. So in my opinion, if you don't like how an instance is run, you can easily switch to another instance.
- Except you can't, because this is not a technical problem, it's a political problem everybody is deliberately ignoring because they know it is real and they know of the extremely negative implications of them.
  
  The vast majority of Lemmy traffic is from .world. No matter what instance you're on, most activities happen from .world and .world content floods the feeds of all the others.
  
  .world insists on federating with Meta.
  
  Therefore NO instance is safe, because you'll always be forced to deal with it indirectly.
  
  That is the insidiousness of .world I tried to warn you all about.
  
  I fucking told you all .world was monopolizing Lemmy and that it was doing it in a way that it implemented the same kind of soft censorship, favoritism and authoritarianism Reddit imposed on its users, and it was herding everyone toward it in the same way old social media did to users in the 10's.
  
  And did a single one of you listen to me? Noooooo. You were too busy getting mad that your investment in a new website was being deconstructed and that you were being burdened with the mental labor of investing yourselves somewhere else.
  
  This is happening 100% because you are all the most spoiled, entitled, selfish, lazy dumbasses history has ever seen, and you deserve every ounce of suffering Meta is going to impose on you and the fediverse as a result.
  
  You've been warned
bring paid off by Meta

If you think Meta cares the least about some little forum with some thousands of users, you are delusional.
- Shill harder, and tell me how to get in on that racket. How much is the employee health insurance?

I smell a rat!

(And it's not me this time, I showered today!)

Yesss omg

Most of the people preemptively defederating from Threads don't understand how ActivityPub works.

I hope the instances I'm on stay federated. It'll be nice having communications with people I'm interested in again, without having to use Meta's trackers to do so.

I was considering starting a mastadon account but I guess I'll pass. Gonna be interesting to see how this changes the fediverse.

edit: oh double fuck you mastadon users. just go join threads already.

Thing about the Fediverse is that software is just software; what you should care about is the instances. There are a whole bunch of Mastodon instances that have already defederated long ago. A few big ones include mas.to, mstdn.social and troet.cafe; you can find the rest here: fedipact.veganism.social/.

adam posted more details tonight :) can't wait honestly. i love how pumped adam is about activitypub and interoperability!

https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/C046LSmPAuN