I follow Biden on Threads via Mastodon. Not that I’m any huge fan of the guy, but I like to keep up with his social media presence all the same. I see value in this integration despite so many people being so aggressively opposed. The Fediverse has very few normies. I still appreciate the ability to observe their activities from a distance.
I use Mastadon pretty regularly and I feel like I somewhat know how it works, yet I read the Threads FAQ on federation and I have no clue what's going on.
But yes, the ability to subscribe to "mainstream" accounts in Threads from mastadon servers (if they allow federation with Meta) would be a good feature.
Going entirely off memory, but the Threads user needs to manually go into their settings and turn on federation. Then your Mastodon or Lemmy server will need to not defederate with Threads. A bunch have done so preemptively out of EEE fears.
What's Threads and why do we need in in the fediverse? I don't have Facebook and don't use any Meta products, so I'm clueless ? Is it like closed source Mastodon or Lemmy?
That is my point. What isn't necessarily obvious, though, is that the scrapable data is more comprehensive than what could be scraped on traditional platforms
it may be more comprehensive than trying to scrape other platforms, but the data that is available is absolutely nothing compared to what they collect on their own platforms. they're almost certainly not very concerned with collecting our relatively mild amount of data.
It's not about collecting data, the fediverse freely shares all its data by nature.
Threads has a lot more users and Meta would use that to attack smaller instances, a bit like what Lemmy world was doing a few months ago.
The biggest instances usually have the most communities and if they ban other instances, rival members are more likely to migrate over than to create copy cat communities.
It's not terrible at the moment but bringing in threads is like throwing a shark in a shrimp tank.
My (self-hosted) Mastodon server seems unable to view profiles on Threads. As far as I can tell, there's nobody to talk to about that.
I don't have high hopes about Meta having good intentions here, but I am eager to see platforms that would have previously been walled gardens open up to the federated model. I do think we have some work to do on the open source side to manage the potential massive increase in exposure once Threads users can follow users of other software.
Of course you can pick a server that blocks Threads if you just don't want to deal with that.
It still needs to be profitable for them. Why would they want non profitable content freeloading on their servers? No doubt it will be collected and sold, just a work in progress.
They sell it to advertisers. We would be hard to target since were not on Metas platform. I would think it's worth less since its not immediately usable for stuffing an ad down our throats and pseudoanonymous.
If there's XMPP involved in that pattern then I question your recollection of events that happened. If anything this is going to be more like e-mail where commercial service providers might want to set up some obstacles to avoid spam but also hurt little guys in the process. We'll see how that goes with EU DSA laws though.
No, no, no, you must respond with a Wikipedia article.
Also, the first article that you responded to has multiple times when Microsoft did this and you should go actually read it. Don't need the specific example that you think acts like a counterpoint to think giant tech corps are assholes and will act like it.
It seems like everyone is forgetting that time exists, and corporations will learn from their mistakes and evolve.
Email was developed, standardized and freely distributed long before the internet became what it is today.
If email were created in this day and age it would look very different and probably fail because of corporate mismanagement (while CEOs take their golden parachutes).
I believe google hangouts and xmpp would like to have a word with you. There was probably a universe where federated xmpp was as ubiquitous as sms, but in this universe, google federated, brought users over with cool features, and then defederated when they had all the users.
If you want another example from the same company in modern times, look at chrome and http/css/js. Google's chokehold on the web ecosystem with chrome means that whatever they do, everyone else has to follow suit or not be compatible with the browser that something like ~75-90% of users use
Initially, Slack integrated with IRC. Which was great! It meant I could use xchat to talk with folks, and could set up simple bots using standard IRC tools.
And then Slack killed that feature...but it absolutely didn't kill IRC, because die hard IRC users never cared about Slack in the first place.
My prediction is it'll be the same --- what sort of people will be attracted to Threads vs a smaller "proper" instance? Probably the sort of people who would never consider a federated platform in the first place.
Just speculation and I could certainly be wrong...
What exactly did Slack "allow" though? The continued existence of an ancient protocol with a niche but dedicated following of predominantly "old school" tech people?
The Fediverse has 1 million active users. Threads has 130 million active users. This is not an EEE play because a 100% successful EEE play would amount to increasing the Threads userbase by less than 1%. Meta is doing this for non-EEE reasons.
One possible non-EEE reason would be to have plausible deniability for monopolistic practices. If they make a show of interoperating with irrelevant nobodies like us, they can pretend to be a nice tech company rather than a mean anti-competitive monopoly.
Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors who are unable to support the new extensions.
By that logic Lemmy/Mastodon/fediverse are already extinguished. Those of us in the fediverse are already "marginalized" wrt Twitter/Threads/Facebook/whatever.
There are very good reasons to hate Meta, but personally, I think EEE isn't the biggest issue.
