The fact that it’s been out for a year and federation is still only half-implemented suggests to me the decision to add it was pretty late in the development process, even if it was early in the marketing process.

Threads is for whoever Meta can sell it to, and I think it was pretty far along in its development before they actually committed to ActivityPub support.

Threads users are much more likely to interact with other microblog software like Mastodon than with Lemmy. It might be possible to post from Threads to Lemmy now by tagging a community much like Mastodon, but I have never seen it done. Lemmy.world does not block threads.net.

You should not trust them.

I don’t think a Mastodon server attempting to attract a mainstream audience should block them though, at least not at this point. We have a chance to welcome millions of people who wouldn’t have even heard of the fediverse otherwise.

There are some loud voices in the fediverse who don’t want it to be very welcoming. Here are a couple examples:

Threads defederation - what could onboard people to the fediverse faster than a giant platform run by Facebook joining? Yes, I hate Facebook as much as everyone else here, but they’re making an offramp for their users and half the fediverse wants to close that off?

Overbearing enforcement of norms - yes, it’s good if people put alt text on their images and content warnings on stuff lots of people find upsetting. It’s harmful to hassle people about it until they leave.

I think people who a small network with strong social norms are better off on servers that are selective about what they federate with to ensure stricter adherence to the preferences of their users. One of the great things about federated systems is that users can pick a place that’s run in a way that works for them.

It was hit with a DDOS for an extended period of time. I suspect the attackers were successful in substantially hampering adoption of Lemmy as a whole.

They have marketing budgets.

Yes, it’s possible to get a rough estimate with some technical work, but AP makes it easy for anyone.

They’re making requests at unknown intervals, often many times per day. Each IP address might represent multiple unique users, or one user might have multiple IPs.

That’s most of it. ActivityPub also makes it possible to know who is subscribed. It’s very hard to count how many people are subscribed to an RSS feed.

I’m guessing not a lot of users know about it. Their ActivityPub implementation is still only about half done.

It will be interesting to see of they promote it heavily when it’s more complete.

There’s nothing keeping them from scraping that kind of data now.

TikTok is really popular operating on essentially the same principle. I, for one want nothing to do with that.

Not yet, but they’re actively developing ActivityPub support.

I block ads pretty aggressively, and I find it surprising anyone else can tolerate the modern internet without doing so.

I would LOVE feedback from folks if you get a chance to try it out!

I have feedback completely unrelated to the recommendation engine: please consider using CSS prefers-color-scheme instead of defaulting to light mode.

Privacy can mean different things in different contexts.

Some peoples’ thoughts go first to sharing content with a restricted audience. ActivityPub isn’t good at that since the admins of every server involved can access the content. That’s also true of centralized social media, though sometimes the admins of those services seem farther removed from users’ social lives. E2EE chat like Matrix and Signal are good options for that use case, and there has been work on adding E2EE options to some ActivityPub software.

I usually treat social media as public, so I’m not concerned with restricting access to things I share that way. I am, however concerned about service providers monitoring behavior like how long I spend looking at a particular post, or trying to track my browsing habits on third-party websites. Fediverse projects do not normally include those kinds of behaviors, and it would be scandalous if a service provider added them.

There are two general areas:

• The history of the internet is full of examples of companies taking data about or creative output from people and trying to make money from it without permission, in ways the original creator might not like. Nobody has gone there with a Fediverse scraper or search project that we know of yet, but it’s going to happen if the Fediverse gets big enough.
• Some people want to be able to easily share things with a certain audience without them being easily discoverable by a different audience. There are of course privacy settings to control visibility and software like Matrix that provides not only access control by cryptographic security, but those add friction. It’s only possible for this group to have it both ways if nobody develops good search tools, which turns some of them into bullies.

I think it’s a small, but very loud minority who have unrealistic expectations about how other people will use data they share in a manner that’s inherently rather public. I kind of see where they’re coming from, but ActivityPub with open federation doesn’t work that way.

Lemmy search works pretty well on larger servers, and they’re indexed by major web search engines.

The microblog side of things is worse, with Mastodon long having near-useless search because it might “encourage negative social dynamics” or some such. Some other software, such as Akkoma has had better search, and Mastodon has recently improved somewhat for accounts that opt into being searchable. Mastodon directs search engines not to index most pages.

Some people get very upset about attempts to build general-purpose fediverse search tools.