If you had told me as recently as two years ago that Meta was going to create a microblogging platform, I would have scoffed. If you had told me that same network would federate over ActivityPub, I would've laughed in your face. But here we are. It's happening. We're no longer at a point wher

The Fediverse is currently divided over whether or not to block Threads. Here are some of the things people are worried about, some opportunities that might come from it, and what we need to do to prepare.

  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
    10·
    11 months ago

    Just reacting as I read below…

    The theory goes like this: a company decides to support an open standard, because it’s a popular thing that people expect support for. Then, when that company’s offering hits a critical mass of users, they quietly kill off support for that standard and keep the people on their platforms.

    Company decides to support an open standard. Once it hits a critical mass, they take control of that standards body. Then they quietly kill of their competition through the standard its self.

    If anything, it may be that Threads is looking to be a major player in the space, and hopes to benefit from an ecosystem shift by being the biggest project out there. Maybe that situation looks like developing a better API and clients than what Mastodon has, and getting other platforms to use it over MastoAPI.

    Now you’ve got the right of it. Activity hub represents a real existential threat to meta in a way that reddit and twittter as corporate entities don’t. Twitter, reddit, etc, they all have more or less the same incentives around what their ultimate goal is for users. This is fundamentally different in the fediverse. Its a difference of alignment in incentives.

    The promise of the Fediverse is that individuals ought to be in charge of who and what they see on the network.

    Its definitely more than that. Reddit didn’t make reddit, redditors did. Twitter didn’t make twitter, people tweeting did. Youtube with out people posting content isnt youtube. A major, if not the main point, of the fediverse is that its we own the network, not some third party. Its our content, our community, our network.

    Either we’re all going to drown in the noise produced by Threads, or the networks will become increasingly isolated.

    Yeah. I have a post on that some where else earlier today. The basic math and network mechanics of it mean that even with marginal adoption, Threads federating is an extinction level event for non-threads instances. If one in ten thousand adopt threads and have a roughly equal engagement rate as current lemmy.world users, there will be a 1:1000 ratio of Threads to non-threads content. Because of this the math involved in social networks will basically make it impossible for any non-threads content to bubble to the top.

    A part of me remains incredibly optimistic: the Fediverse might actually hit an inflection point that transforms the entire Internet for billions of people. In our battle against social siloes and surveillance capitalism, we might find that the Fediverse won.

    Appreciate the article, don’t necessarily agree with all of the conclusions, but really appreciate the work. My bigger concern isn’t even threads dominating and making the rest of the fediverse irrelevant. My concern is Meta taking control of ActivityPub through soft engagement/ coercion/ engagement. The protocol is whats important, and realistically, we’re still in the infancy of federation & the fediverse. Its underfunded/ a hobby project at best. But its also our best real shot at a free and open internet we can all be a part of. I think it the fediverse needs (no pun intended) some really significant ‘meta’ level improvements that deal with distancing and federation with more granularity. On/ Off federation prevented us from getting to one million users, and a lack of engagement is still whats holding us back.

    • athos77@kbin.social
      6·
      11 months ago

      So, as a rexxit refugee who doesn’t fully understand the details of federation, I have a question. When I make a post or comment and it gets shared out, is the actual content shared out, or just a link back to my content. Because I can see Threads issues either way: if copies of the content get shared and Threads’ userbase is so incredibly massive, then all the smaller instances are going to struggle with storage. And if links are shared, then smaller instances are going to struggle with traffic. [I suspect both storage and traffic will be issues anyway, but that each is more of a problem depending on how communication and federation is handled.]

      It’s just something I’ve been curious about, because most of the comments I’ve seen have been about the difficulty of moderating the content, or what Meta will do with the data or your they’ll take over, but I don’t recall seeing anything about the strain on actual infrastructure and the additional cost to support the influx of users.

      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
        3·
        11 months ago

        I ran an instance for a bit when I thought the migration would be more substantial. Basically, each instance gets a full comment of every comment and post, less the heavier data like images and videos (but maybe sometimes images).

        Its also all publicly available. If meta wants it, its all out there in the open now, no federation required.

        So yeah, it could become an issue for smaller instances, but honestly, its a problem that smaller instances would likely welcome. I’m by no means advocating for meta here, but content, submissions, engagement; they are the life blood of places like this and we just do not have enough. No parts of the fediverse do.

      • density@kbin.social
        2·
        11 months ago

        I have actually seen people worrying about the computational burden of handling all the extra data this could produce. I seem to recall someone actually doing back of envelope math and concluding that federation with threads would be cost prohibitive for a lot of instances.

        If that is true then the whole debate we are having is irrelevant because federation will basically not be possible for websites which are seemingly being operated without anything resembling a business plan.

      • thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.world
        2·
        11 months ago

        You’re completely right that there are likely to be major scalability issues, at this point I don’t think anybody fully knows what the implications are, and it’s not getting a lot of discussion. This is part of why Meta’s proceeding slowly and presumably we’ll see a lot of performance work over the next few months to deal with the expected onslaught.

    • nutomic@lemmy.ml
      6·
      11 months ago

      The Activitypub protocol is nothing but a piece of paper. Meta can rewrite it if they want, but that doesn’t mean Lemmy, Mastodon or the many other platforms would automatically use it. Programmers have to implement it, and then instance admins have to deploy it. So by inertia it’s likely that changes would be ignored by most platforms. However they could easily bribe developers or admins to make certain changes.

      • density@kbin.social
        3·
        11 months ago

        My understanding is that corporations are constantly trying and sometimes succeeding at influencing w3c standards to go in a direction which is favorable to themselves. For example increasing the legitimacy of DRM and surveillance. Developers of non-profit software (eg mozilla) then have to choose whether to be out of compliance or support nefarious technologies. If they choose against supporting the standards, then all users notice is that the application “doesn’t work” on certain websites.

        I don’t necessarily know if running away and hiding is along term solution to this though.

        • nutomic@lemmy.ml
          3·
          11 months ago

          Federation is different from a browser. Even if Threads pushed through some protocol changes on their side, it would change anything for Lemmy, Peertube etc federating with the original protocol. They couldnt federate with Threads then, but clearly most users wouldnt mind.

    • BarrierWithAshes@kbin.social
      3·
      11 months ago

      Yeah I mean i’d maybe, just maybe consider allowing Threads to exist on the fediverse if not for the mountains of evidence and arguements put forth against it.

      Meanwhile the arguments for federation are literally ‘you can message people across the fediverse’. That’s it.

    • Sean Tilley@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      2·
      11 months ago

      Thank you for your response, I appreciate your insights!

      I think if there were really serious problems with a future version of ActivityPub, we could feasibly do one of two things:

      1. Maintain a fork of the protocol - this has actually already happened once, with an implementation standard called Litepub.
      2. Move over to a different protocol, such as Zot.

      The second route is probably much harder, but there’s no real reason why a zombified Meta version of the protocol would do much of anything to anybody running vanilla ActivityPub at this time. You’d probably have some feature incompatibilities and breakage, but…if you’re not going to federate with them anyway, what can they actually do?