A fascinating take on it. I’m still wary about Threads interoperating with the rest of the Fediverse, and how that may change the culture as well as the system over time (Meta would have the power and money to throw around regarding changes to ActivityPub implementation), but I also see it similar to email. And I’ve spoken about this before to the point I sound like a broken record …

But people understand the basics of email. They understand they can sign up for a Gmail account and send an email to anyone else. Maybe Threads will be our Gmail here, and introduce people into the idea of a wider open social media concept in a more familiar way to them, and they can branch out as needed or just choose to stay on Threads.

In any case, any given instance can choose to block Threads if they so choose.

Of these [alternative platforms researchers have moved to], Mastodon, which has seen significant growth since Musk’s takeover of Twitter was announced, was the most widely used. About 47 percent of researchers said they had started using the open-source platform in the past year. LinkedIn and Instagram were the next most popular, drawing 35 and 27 percent of researchers, respectively. Interestingly, Meta’s Twitter competitor, Threads, took the number four spot even though the app launched only days before Nature conducted the poll.

It’s great to see wider adoption of the Fediverse. Mastodon is a great and stable Twitter alternative.

They tried to get away with not having it, hoping people would be happy consuming curated (paid) content and making them advertising bucks. I bet they had it ready to go from the get-go and were hoping they wouldn’t have to turn it on.

You can try these steps if you want:https://the.coolest.zone/m/random/p/4040

Be aware there’s a post and a reply to complete the steps (too long for one post)

They worked as recent as a few days ago when setting up my dev instance.

I raised that as an issue on codeberg last night. It’s very troubling.

The article says it looks like Twitter… To me, it looks like Instagram without the images, and not entirely like Twitter at all. Perhaps I’m missing something.

They might not, and frankly that would be the ideal solution, wouldn’t it? They fork Mastodon, have their own isolated little universe, and we have our own little Fediverse over here. But the rumors swirling indicate that they do want to federate with larger instances that will be willing to follow their moderation standards and optionally take advertisements - I explain over here why that is likely the preferable approach for Meta.

So, as an example. I am on the.coolest.zone which is where my account is registered. I have a magazine on it called [email protected], which is where I am viewing this thread. In fact, you will be able to view it here: https://the.coolest.zone/m/[email protected]

I have only three actual magazines on my own instance - random (this is necessary for all kbin instances to collect uncategorized posts), BestOfBlind, and Android (which was my attempt to create a magazine that collects threads based on hashtag, but it’s not working right). Everything else is a magazine which is actually a federated version of either a kbin magazine from another kbin community or a Lemmy community from a Lemmy instance.

The couple of things that seem to be missing or broken right now:

• As stated, trying to get a magazine going based on hashtag does not seem to be working.
• There’s no way to collect up multiple communities into one, so I have separate magazines for android (kbin.social) and android (lemmy.world). That’s a little annoying!
• As far as I can tell, you can’t delete a magazine yet. If I federate a magazine / community and decide I actually don’t want it on my instance anymore (or I created m/android to test the hashtag and found it doesn’t work right), tough luck it seems - I’m stuck with it.
• Hosting costs - Of my 80GB VPS, I appear to have used about 60GB so far just in federating other content to me. This is going to become a problem within this week! I don’t know what to do about that or whether there’s a way to prune old content or what! (I don’t want to re-host everyone’s memes, as dank as they are!)

kbin and Lemmy are both very new applications, so these will likely shake themselves out over time, but it’s a bit of a rough experience right now. 😅

I can’t edit and have my edits federated out (edits federate if someone is following you, not if you are following them) so I want to point out that those links are somehow pointing to users instead of communities, whoops. I was referring to e.g. https://the.coolest.zone/m/android being a collection including contents on that magazine, contents from https://kbin.social/m/android , contents from https://lemmy.world/c/android , etc.

Completely agreed on the concept of needing to federate out entire spaces (magazines / communities) - this is a huge gap currently, especially on kbin where nearly every community (and nearly every user) is on kbin.social .

My thought is that Lemmy and kbin, after fixing and updating core functionality (easier said than done), need to jump on the idea of instances having magazines/communities that pull from multiple other sources, rather than federating each community independently - e.g. I could have an @android which is pulling from @android , @android , etc, and the experience is relatively seamless - if someone drops out, yes we lose a lot of content, but others pick up the slack.

This would require more overhead from admins and instance owners to manage which other communities their own communities are pulling from, but I think it would be worthwhile for a better overall user experience and to help decentralize these communities in general.

That is a completely valid take here. My partner who runs our Mastodon instance will be preemptively defederating with Threads (on my suggestion), so I do agree with you, but I realize not everyone in the Fediverse may share that take - it’s a weighted scale where one end is “mass adoption of a Web 3.0 decentralized Fediverse” and the other end is “but adoption in which most people are on Threads will be centralization anyway, so we will have already failed.”

I think in any case it may not matter, as I believe Meta / Threads will only federate with instances that agree to follow their moderation standards - after all, Meta likely doesn’t want porn and Nazis federated to their communities because then they can’t run advertisements. As a Fediverse community, we’re pretty good at taking care of the Nazi thing, but Mastodon’s got an awful lot of porn on it.

It will really depend on which admins take that deal to be beholden to Meta’s standards, potentially opening themselves up not only to huge moderation concerns but to a future requirement of taking advertisements. I hope large instances will not. I would prefer to see the Fediverse operate separate from Threads, who will be using the ActivityPub protocol but not part of the larger Fediverse. Similar to how the conservative “truth.social” uses the Mastodon application and ActivityPub but is not part of the Fediverse because it is closed off.

A little off topic, but I was very surprised Reddit didn’t pursue a similar approach of “we will lower greatly the costs of API but we will serve advertisements in the API as regular posts, so you must display them and can’t strip them out.”

When this was linked a previous time, I wrote up a reply to it which I think applies here as well, so I’m gonna shamelessly copy and paste myself 🙂

I think the big thing to take away from that article is… XMPP developers cared so much about retaining federation with Google Talk that they “became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers” as it is put there. Google came in and said “this is our house now, adapt or die.”

For our current fediverse, it’s important I think, as a community, we put our foot down with Meta and say “no, this is our house. If you don’t adapt to us, we don’t federate with you. If you deviate from the ActivityPub protocol or our other implementations that we do above the ActivityPub protocol (things like boosts/upvotes/downvotes standards as agreed upon by Lemmy/kbin, for example), you will break federation with us, and we will be okay with that.” We cannot become the Meta watchers.

ActivityPub is just a protocol and they can use it. It doesn’t mean they have to be compatible with us. Let them have their Twitter/Instagram hybrid application. Do we care that much whether we can or cannot see their posts?

To your point, many of us will defederate, either out of politics or financial necessity. There’s rumors milling around that Meta / Threads will only initially federate with a few trusted larger instances and be monetarily compensated for it (aka those who will make a deal with the devil to moderate - more on my thoughts on that here).

It may come to the point where a lot of us are running on our own smaller “Fediverse”, intentionally divorced from Meta and those instances which have federated with Meta and taken their advertisements and paid posts. If this is the case, we must take the bad with the good - we will always be smaller and niche, and our less techno-idealistic friends will not join our tiny Fediverse because the barrier to entry will remain high.

I think it’s “corporate pragmatism” disguised as “altruism”.

Like, Meta wants a mass of users on its platform very quickly. (The average person signing up for Threads will likely not understand federation and some of these people are not actually on Threads.) Meta also knows that these sorts of instances go down all the time - during the Mastodon migration in November, many instances were stood up - 25% went offline between then and now, according to this blog post. Some of that is server costs I bet. Meta can pay a small amount to instance owners to help offset those costs and also incentivize them monetarily to keep themselves online.

Much less altruistic, and this one is completely rumors and I’m afraid I’ve lost the original source which claimed it, but… Some chatter went on that Meta would let the instances it federates with choose whether they want to have the advertisements and sponsored posts federated to them. Obviously, if they take the ads they get more money, and that’ll help offset more of the costs…

And on Meta’s side, suddenly they can tell advertisers of this amazing built in user base they can sell ads to. Win-win, except for us (the users) who lose.

I think the big thing to take away from that article is… XMPP developers cared so much about retaining federation with Google Talk that they “became watchers and debuggers of Google’s servers” as it is put there. Google came in and said “this is our house now, adapt or die.”

For our current fediverse, it’s important I think, as a community, we put our foot down with Meta and say “no, this is our house. If you don’t adapt to us, we don’t federate with you. If you deviate from the ActivityPub protocol or our other implementations that we do above the ActivityPub protocol (things like boosts/upvotes/downvotes standards as agreed upon by Lemmy/kbin, for example), you will break federation with us, and we will be okay with that.” We cannot become the Meta watchers.

ActivityPub is just a protocol and they can use it. It doesn’t mean they have to be compatible with us. Let them have their Twitter/Instagram hybrid application. Do we care that much whether we can or cannot see their posts?