Adam Mosseri:
Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.
Tell that to @[email protected] (the creator of Mastdon, AFAIK). He’s very excited about this. And I can’t honestly understand why.
https://mstdn.social/@[email protected]/111576826633308486
Well he’s not alone … a number of relatively vocal “fedi-advocates” are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.
Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where “we” are up to.
From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves “the good guys” and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating “significant” technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They’re all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.
When face-to-face with the prospect of having “your thing” accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. “Growing the protocol” and “growing” mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.
This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they’re “the good guys” and don’t work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their “ethical-tech” world … the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.
Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer “growth” might completely miss the point especially if it’s by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.
And this is where I’m up to on this issue … both sides seem not to be talking about it much.
What is the “emotional”, “social fabric”, “vibes and feelings” factor in all this … that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens … when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL’s loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I’m betting most will feel off … like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit … passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves … “what was the point of coming here in the first place?”.
Now, to be real, it’s not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it’s an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won’t be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? … that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it’d rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)
Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they’re willing to drink for their ends.
For my purposes … I don’t think I’ll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens … the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it … I’d rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.
Not that I care much about Mastodon either way, but you had me up to “Go back to Twitter” 😳
Nothing can be that bad, and even if it was, that doesn’t magically make Twitter any less of a teeming shithole, surely?! 🤯
The communities you like, are shielded by those OSS terms: if Meta does something to the tech that the communities don’t like, they’re free to show Meta the finger. The tech is not, and can never be, controlled by Meta; the communities are not, and can never be, bound by Meta.
Meanwhile, having a company like Meta collaborate on developing and testing the tech, is something positive.
Yea I was really confused to read that. I’m on Kbin / Lemmy significantly more than I log in to Mastadon (I think I’ve opened that app 5 times in the past year), so now I guess I’ll just delete Mastadon.
I bet he’s getting a big bag of money.
Are you truly incapable of imagining that someone might have a different opinion than you without being bribed?
“Everyone who disagrees with me must be getting paid” is not the mature take you think it is.
Are you truly incapable of acknowledging that large bags of money motivate people to do unpopular things sometimes?
I really don’t care about Mastadon as I haven’t used it much, but I couldn’t really think of a good reason for federating with Meta.
So you have evidence of bribes?
That’s cool. Please share with the class.
LMAO… “bribes”… no, I have no evidence of “bribes.” I don’t have any evidence of a financial incentive either, as very clearly evident by my phrasing starting with “I bet…” I’m simply relying on 40 years of not having my head completely up my own ass to make some inferences about things, and if I’m wrong, then I’m wrong. I think you’re being intentionally obtuse. None of this really is impactful, but you sure seem to have an agenda.
You have evidence that I’m wrong, correct?
Well a good reason could be that it brings federation to the masses. You know, like everyone who uses federated networks wants it to be. This isn’t some exclusive club and wider adoption is a good thing.
If only to prove that it can work.
I wouldn’t call that a good reason to team up with Meta, but I would call it a plausible. Everyone does not want to federate with the largest social media company in the world, I can promise you that. If you like federation, you’d probably like it to not be engulfed by megacorps (unless you stand to profit from it).
Do you understand what “federating” means? It’s a permission, not an obligation, for the instances to interact. It can also be filtered in any number of ways by any user.
Yeah, there’s a good chance he’s either a naïve moron that thinks Meta has good intentions, or a techbro that soyfaces at any proprietary technology that has incorporated a trendy technology.
The fediverse means all of them. Mastodon users post to Lemmy and Kbin. We’ll see threads here.
Not if you block them. Up to you, though.
Just migrate your account to a different instance, if you plan to use it. It’s not difficult and many of them already defederate from Threads (mstdn.social, for instance).
I think I’ve logged in for a collective 15 minutes. I deleted it about 45 minutes ago.
Let’s apply Occam’s Razor. We all created these juggernaut social media vampires in the 2000s as an alternative to isolated forums and the first federation attempts with Webrings. When it started, Facebook was a good thing.
He could simply be repeating the same mistake the entire internet did by embracing monolithic social media sites in the first place.