What’s Meta up to?
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Embrace ActivityPub, , Mastodon, and the fediverse
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Extend ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse with a very-usable app that provides additional functionality (initially the ability to follow everybody you’re following on Instagram, and to communicate with all Threads users) that isn’t available to the rest of the fediverse – as well over time providing additional services and introducing incompatibilities and non-standard improvements to the protocol
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Exploit ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse by utilizing them for profit – and also using them selfishly for Meta’s own ends
Since the fediverse is so much smaller than Threads, the most obvious ways of exploiting it – such as stealing market share by getting people currently in the fediverse to move to Threads – aren’t going to work. But exploitation is one of Meta’s core competences, and once you start to look at it with that lens, it’s easy to see some of the ways even their initial announcement and tiny first steps are exploiting the fediverse: making Threads feel like a more compelling platform, and reshaping regulation. Longer term, it’s a great opportunity for Meta to explore – and maybe invest in – shifting their business model to decentralized surveillance capitalism.
I think that Facebook is trying to kill the Fediverse and Twitter, before either becomes a real competitor.
It makes sense when you look at the big picture; Facebook’s power is mostly Facebook itself (connecting people), Instagram (sharing pictures), and WhatsApp (“private” [eh] messaging). Microblogging has a small market in comparison with those three, but it opens a door to them - so both the Fediverse and Twitter have room to expand right into FB’s turf.
So in the case of the Fediverse, if my reasoning is correct (dunno), the third “E” would be the traditional “extinguish”, not “exploit” as proposed in the OP.
Ugh, at least they mention regulation and acknowledge XMPP still exists but this is one of the worst of these panicked scare pieces I’ve read yet. It’s filled with bad faith interpretation of quotes, poor analysis, and baseless speculation. The motto of all of these articles seems to be “if I can dream up a way to be scared of it, it must be true!”
How do you dismissively call Evan Podromou a “fediverse influencer”?! He’s one of the fucking co-authors of ActivityPub.
Their treatment of these two Mosseri quotes is just bad faith, fever swamp nonsense:
“I think we might be a more compelling platform for creators, particularly for the newer creators who are more and more savvy, if we are a place where you don’t have to feel like you have to trust us forever.”
“Eventually, it should also be possible to enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app/server.”
They conclude that their (obvious!) goal is to be completely untrustworthy while giving people the false belief that they’re trustworthy. And the evidence? It’s all in the quote! He used the word “feel” and that can only mean a covert declaration of opposite day.
Same with the second quote. It’s “already clear that people won’t be able to move all their followers to other fediverse servers.” Why? It’s implied that the use of the word “eventually” means never (it doesn’t. look it up.). Does it matter that the quote is from a post talking about their gradual implementation of ActivityPub? Does it matter that moving accounts would logically occur near the end of that timeline? Of course not! We’re playing a game where we take a quote and manipulate it until it gives us whatever meaning we want. The other piece of evidence is that they haven’t decided whether federation will be opt-in or opt-out, which has nothing to do with moving your account. Make no mistake though, it is CLEAR that those quotes mean the opposite of what they say.
This is what the first quote means: ‘we can build legitimate trust by not locking people into our platform.’ Does that mean they won’t lock people in? No. But that quote isn’t evidence they won’t. Pretending that it is is tinfoil-hat bullshit.
Put the current fediverse to the side, and imagine a future of decentralized surveillance capitalism, where “Meta’s fediverse” filled with instances run by brands, politicians, celebrities, influencers, and non-profits – all doing harvesting data on Meta’s behalf
What a fucking nightmare that would be. Herd a bunch of crazy cats you don’t control for a rat’s nest of data without a simple way to use it to target ad deliveries (which is how they ultimately make money). Trusting someone like Alex Jones with the core of their business model? Riiiiight. And if they did it? So what? It would have no impact on Mastodon or the larger Fediverse. Even if Ron DeSantis had his own Meta-sponsored instance, everyone could just block it. I also fail to see how being in a direct business relationship with those people severs their connection. It’s a much stronger connection than them just having an account on their platform. And it just reintroduces the moderation problem this is claimed to solve. Public pressure would just shift from “ban user” to “block instance,” losing them the data and revenue anyway.
What happened to the “extinguish” step?
I think it’s important to include that. Threads isn’t going to just happily coexist.
there isnt one, because even the ‘extend’ in this hyperbolic scenario isnt real
o0o0o0 the big ‘extend’ is threads users will get to use the threads app. puhlease. thats no extension of AP
everyones getting their sphincter tight over their own hate and nothing more.
The original sense of EEE’s extend was pushing features that were not standard (to IE). An example would be for example if Threads implemented a stickers function that only worked in the Threads apps but to us only appeared as sticker-id:123456. Any features built around AP that worsens the experience for others can be seen as “extend”.
if users on my system want some bell or whistle somewhere else, groovy, dont let the door hit ya on the way out.
threads is not going to magically, silently create a dependency in my system. its exactly like SMTP. no one is attempting to EEE email.
i am not/will not receive anything from threads not in the protocol spec, and if my users dont like that they can go somewhere else. this is not a problem for me.
i dont care what the threads instance has to offer with regards to bells and whistles, it affects me not.
no one is attempting to EEE email.
Yes… they are?
Have you noticed how Gmail labels don’t work with other email providers? Folders and categories? Stars and Important? Many people have come to rely on these features and moving to other providers becomes a bit of a hassle. This is the naughty extension of e-mail.
Another great example is github. Git is open and interoperable, but most companies using github are stuck to it because they use Github also for issues, pull requests, and many other things.
You should really read the article…
None of those things sounds inherently bad to me.
They might not be inherently bad, but they’ll be likely bad depending on how it’s done, and Facebook isn’t to be trusted.
Just for the sake of example:
- What if Threads develops features that work well with the ActivityPub protocol, but since they’re closed-source they cannot be implemented by Mastodon instances?
- What if Threads implements asymmetric federation - where Threads users can interact with outsiders’ content, but outsiders cannot interact with Threads’ content?
- What if Threads has some bullshit term of agreement like “by using our platform you agree to have your data collected, and if you’re seeing this you’re already using our platform”?
- etc.
Note that Facebook has a long story of user-hostile decisions; as in, this crap wouldn’t be below its moral standards. So, while most of the time this would be FUD, in this case it’s just F, no uncertainty or doubt.
What specific features do you have in mind that could be implemented in a closed-source manner that couldn’t be reverse-engineered and implemented by open-source instance software too? It’s not easy to come up with such a thing, and it’s unclear what benefit it would serve Meta that they can’t accomplish by just not joining the Fediverse in the first place.
If Threads implements asymmetric federation, I’ll shrug and ignore them because I’ll never see their content and it won’t ever affect me.
Doesn’t Threads already have a bullshit terms of service? That’s my default assumption for any website, really. But even if they don’t, ActivityPub is an open protocol and so of course my data is being collected by who-knows-how-many organizations already. Meta doesn’t need to do anything new at all to get access to it.
Sorry for the wall of text.
What specific features do you have in mind that could be implemented in a closed-source manner that couldn’t be reverse-engineered and implemented by open-source instance software too?
The features don’t need to be impossible to reverse engineer; they could be costly enough to do so, rely on other FB/Meta platforms, or demand server capabilities past what you’d expect from typical Mastodon instances. For example:
- implementing some data format that is decoded by the front-end
- allowing you to access content from FB/IG/WhatsApp from Threads
- “we now allow big arse videos”.
and it’s unclear what benefit it would serve Meta that they can’t accomplish by just not joining the Fediverse in the first place.
Killing a bird and a baby mammoth with a single stone, before they grow and invade your turf.
On one side you have Twitter/X; it bleeds money and Musk is an idiot, but he has enough money to throw at the problems until they go away, and he has a “vishun” about an “errything app” that would clearly compete with FB/IG/WhatsApp. On another you have the Fediverse; it’s small and negligible but it has potential for unrestricted growth, and already includes things like Matrix (that competes with WhatsApp) and Friendica (that competes with FB).
From Meta’s point of view, Twitter/X is by far the biggest threat. It could be addressed without federation, but by doing so would feed Mastodon, and a stronger Mastodon means a stronger Fediverse and this power would put Matrix, Friendica etc. in a better position. With federation however they can EEE one while killing another, and still advertise the whole thing as “I don’t understand, why you say that we have a monopoly over online communication? We’re even part of a federation? Meta plays nice with competitors. I’m so confused~”.
“Some data format” is still a pretty vague handwave, IMO. What would they implement that other Fediverse users would need to care about? Some kind of proprietary image or video format? I don’t see how that would gain traction.
Fediverse users can already link to FB/IG/WhatsApp content. Are you suggesting embedding it somehow? I’m not sure how that could be done in a proprietary manner that other implementations couldn’t copy.
“We now allow big arse videos” is definitely not a feature that couldn’t be reverse engineered. Instances can already do their own hosting, or not, depending on the resources the host wants to dedicate.
I’m sure that Meta would just love to be able to push a button that made all their competitors die. Everyone wants that button. Look around threads like this and count how many users would love to push that button themselves and wipe Meta out with it. But I’m just not seeing how Meta is going to do that by federating. As long as everyone keeps on their toes about how their resources are being used and what extensions they’re adding to ActivityPub - something that they should be doing regardless of whether Meta is involved - the Fediverse seems pretty solid against attack to me.
Note: I did read your comment fully, but I’m going to address specific points, otherwise the discussion gets too long. (Sorry!)
“Some data format” is still a pretty vague handwave […]
It is vague because there are multiple ways for Threads to screw with the Fediverse through data formats. But if you want a more specific example:
Let’s say that Meta creates a new image format called TREDZ. It fills the same purpose as JPG, but it’s closed source. The Threads app has native support for TREDZ images, but your browser doesn’t render it.
If you access a Mastodon instance through Threads, everything works well, since the Threads app has support for other image formats. However, since your browser and current Mastodon apps have no support for TREDZ, pics in this format fail to render. You get broken content as a result, and probably some Threads crowds screeching at you because you ignored their picture, saying “u uze mastadon? lmaaao its broken it doesnt even pictures lol”, encouraging you to ditch your instance to join Threads instead.
And you might say “reverse engineer TREDZ, problem solved”. However:
- reverse engineering is costly and time-consuming
- Meta has professional coders in a paycheck, Mastodon relies mostly on volunteers
- Meta could easily encumber TREDZ with all sorts of nasty legal shit, like parents, and aggressively defend them.
As such, on a practical level, it would be not feasible to reverse-engineer TREDZ. And even if it was, the time necessary to do so is time that Threads is still causing damage to Mastodon.
Of course, this is just an example that I made up on the spot. Meta can think on more efficient ways to do so.
I’m sure that Meta would just love to be able to push a button that made all their competitors die. […]
Yup. As you said, everyone wants that button. But due to the difference in power, Meta is closer to get that button than Mastodon is.
the Fediverse seems pretty solid against attack to me.
The protocol might be solid, but the community isn’t. Communities stronger than the Fediverse died; and the Fediverse has the mixed blessing of decentralisation - the death of a part doesn’t drag the other parts to the grave, but the survival of the other parts doesn’t help much the dying one either.
Actually, I’d say “let them use TREDZ and destroy themselves if they want, problem solved.” In this day and age nobody wants a proprietary image format, and if Threads won’t display in a browser they’ve just blown one of their legs off.
This is a general problem with trying to make Threads depend on proprietary formats, they can’t do that and still have it work in an ordinary web browser.
Most people don’t even know what’s a proprietary image format. From their PoV it would be “shitty broken Mastodon doesn’t show images properly”. And they would still pressure Mastodon users to switch.
if Threads won’t display in a browser they’ve just blown one of their legs off.
I’m not sure but I think that a similar strategy could work for browsers, using a web plugin.
But even if Meta decided that Threads is unavailable from browsers, it wouldn’t be blowing one of Threads’ legs off. There are far more mobile than desktop users nowadays; and if they want to EEE the Fediverse, they need numbers for that.
