A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.
However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don’t have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.
What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it’d be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.
What actions can we take to deal with Threads?
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Threads doesn’t need to do an EEE attack. They’ve already gained many more users than the entire Fediverse. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to not join the Fediverse at all.
I would never use Threads, but I would use a Mastodon instance that federated with Threads. I already see many journalists and content creators I like trying it out, who either stopped using Mastadon long ago or never even tried it in the first place. If Threads started doing things that negatively affected my experience, I would then switch to a Mastodon instance that wasn’t federated with Threads.
Here’s Eugen Rotchko’s thoughts.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
What an excellent article. Informative and to the point.
Recommend everyone read it.
I’m going to recommend that if W3C starts accepting changes to the AP standard from Meta, the community must maintain a fork that rips out any offending parts.
The part that most concerns me is that meta is going to be able to use it’s considerable influence to fuck with AP. Although, at this point I’m 50/50 on whether they even bother with federation.
The W3C has shown in the past that it can’t be trusted not to take bribes. See alse: EME
I was recently asked by my employer if we should move our social media efforts to fediverse and my recommendation was that this community it’s both too small and also would be hostile (rightly) to corporate empty posting.
As soon as threads has a web interface that’s usable I will be starting up there…
You put your recycling in the blue can, compost in the green can and your corporate garbage on Meta.
The whole idea is they should setup their own instance, and try and encourage a community there.
Governments should also setup their own lemmy/mastadon instances as well, use it for PR/interaction.
I think we got to a point in corporate comms where everyone decided we have to post at a regular interval, even when there’s nothing interesting happening.
This feela like a good time to revaluate what we do on social. I have thought about standing up an instance, but realistically we have our internal Teams that employees use… So they wouldn’t use it, and I can’t imagine myself subscribing to a bunch of company instances, so it seems like it’s an effort for nobody.
That said we often put on community events like hackathons. I think situations like that are perfect for posting on our cyber security servers.
Less white noise trash is better.
Ignore it. Defederate. Defederate with any instances that chose to federate with it. Keep the fediverse small and independent. It’s nice here, let’s keep it nice.
Yeap. It doesn’t to go mainstream; it’s already successful.
Push celebrities, influencers, and businesses to create their own instances, outside of Meta.
If they just use a Threads account, then the Fediverse gets made irrelevant. Along come the Three E’s, and Meta walls up the garden and starts putting billboards up everywhere.
Celebrities, influencers, & businesses need to know that they can now have a social media presence that they own, rather than rent, where they can make the rules for the communities they host. It’s good for them in that it keeps their Fediverse presence theirs, they get to call the shots and choose how their instance is set up.
Because if enough people have a strong Fediverse presence outside of Threads land, it’ll make it much harder for Meta to pull the plug.
Join the pact and not just vow but actually do defederate Threads as soon as it comes online: https://fedipact.online/
Some food for thought from Mastodon:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
The EEE argument is a red herring at the moment. Sure, in the future, Meta and others could get clever in ways we can’t imagine right now, but currently it’s a “sky is falling” kind of threat. As it currently stands, the path from Threads launching to “Meta killing the fediverse” has all the logical progression as the Underpants Gnomes.
You’re right. It’s all FUD at this point. There’s nothing stopping servers from federating for now and then disconnecting later if an actual issue comes up.
The problem is like the boiling frog analogy. Its never easy to get consensus on whether the latest insult is too much and so inertia holds everyone in place until its too late.
You don’t need to get consensus though. The Fediverse isn’t a monolith and you can change servers if you feel the one you’re on isn’t working for you anymore.
Yep. As the old saying goes: Divided we stand, united we fall.
No, wait…
What is the point of using something that’s federated if we all have to do things the same way? Sounds like you just want a centralized site where you get to make the rules.
Well we they could just be centralized in their own decentralized instance lol
I don’t think we should defederate threads. It would only give Meta a walled garden which we will be outside of. Let them embrace us here and encourage everybody to scatter across instances so they can’t defederate reasonably
That actually sounds like a good idea. Are there any drawbacks to this that we’re missing though?
The drawbacks is that we aren’t showing mastodon as an alternative. If we defederate we cannot tell people it’s “threads without the ads”. I know people talk about Embrace, Extend, Extinguish with Google, but Meta have been rather keen on decentralisation recently, even claiming that they want their “Metaverse” platform to be decentralised
It’s a clear EEE attack. Do not federate!
This makes zero sense. There is no financial incentive for an EEE attack, and these companies don’t do anything without financial incentive.
Your content isn’t original or interesting enough for meta to want it, and even if they did, they already have access to it without federation.
Threads on its own already dwarfs the entirety of the global fediverse by orders of magnitude. Anyone screaming EEE is just fucking stupid.
“Should ‘we’ do?”
Nothing. If people and/or communities coming in through Threads are engaging in good faith, cool, more nice folks to have a community with. People/communities engaging in bad faith get blocked/defederated as is already common practice (and seems to be working outstandingly already, looking at average quality of posts and discourse “here” as compared to the “big platforms”).
When Meta/Threads is hosting communities I like to see/be a part of, I’ll figure out how to subscribe/integrate those. Besides that, they’re free and welcome to run echo chambers in their own instances and communities, I don’t see how any of that would ever show up on my feed.
Threads is Meta. By definition they are not engaging in good faith. Good faith is not a Meta value.
Is it (more) about Meta themselves, or rather about individual users, though?
I think we should defederate any corp version of any federated app. Not due to privacy or anything, but because it silos anyone using those services from everyone else. Bluntly, I don’t want people’s B.S. propeganda on the fediverse, and the stupid crap conspiracy farm that Facebook and other places have become.
I’m sure it won’t stop the stupid from reaching us, but it should limit the amount and impact that those users have. Additionally, it will remove a lot of high quality content from those services making them less viable for corps to run and maintain. They will happily farm the fediverse for content to attract users they can monitize… I’m not a fan of handing them more content to steal while they share zero of the profits of that content with either the creators or the communities that handle that data.
I’m not doing their job for them in promoting entertaining and informative posts just so they can make money on it. They want it, they can put forth the effort themselves.
Put another way, given the size of Meta and its userbase, it’s completely infeasible for a typical instance to moderate on their behalf, so defederating due to insufficient moderation makes sense. Just like with Beehaw and sh.itjust.works or whatever. (I take for granted that moderation will suck ass because gestures vaguely at Facebook.)
That’s a good enough reason for me. I also think federating with Meta is a bad idea on principle and out of self-interest, since they will extinguish the fediverse at the first possible opportunity and federating with them gives them the chance to draw in users and later wall them off.
Make an account and use chatgpt to shit post on it.
Threats is a better name for that data collecting pos.
