What if Meta’s hidden objective behind the Threads-to-Mastodon initiative is a play on app.net? And, what if threads.net is a measured step towards what could be the greatest pivot in all of tech?
That’s obvious. The question is how to stop them.
defederating with them and letting them fend for themselves in their shitty platform is the low hanging fruit solution.
The answer is actually to outcompete them. If its way easier and more useful to find information on Threads and their version of Lemmy people will start using it more and more. If AskDocs, AskHistorians, LegalAdvice and other useful subs popped up on a Meta version of Lemmy I would use a Lemmy instance that federated with it because its valuable information I want access to.
Just like twitter and instagram are basically required right now for 3D artists to find jobs, we will be required to use Facebook’s version of twitter, reddit, and instagram if they get the huge user base that twitter and reddit are pushing away, tiktok might lose from a ban, and they already have from instagram.
I hate facebook/meta but if its the best place to find information and work i will use it just like i currently begrudgingly use instagram for finding work.
We need to realize that evangelizing like Stallman is NOT how we grow the open web and FOSS. it’s by making killer apps/hardware like the Steam Deck did so well. People don’t use tech for the philosophy behind it, they use it as a tool to complete their task or improve their day. At the end of the day the best tool wins, not the most ethically made tool.
Currently the best thing we could do is get Lemmy to work better with mastodon and vice versa. Thats done by allowing Lemmy accounts to follow Lemmy and Mastodon accounts and by improving the UX for a Lemmy post to be made with mastodon so people post to a community like they would use a hashtag
I don’t think we can outcompete them, not when they will probably be pouring money to take over somehow. Before anything else we need to make sure we won’t get swallowed.
The Steam Deck is great but it was made by a huge corp with huge money, not volunteers.
We can, open source projects can move wither because of less bureaucracy. We can also do things they will refuse . For example mastodon can add an optimal for you page that is a chronological feed where 1 in every 4 posts is a post based on your likes or the most upvoted posts from a lemmy community you follow or the most liked post that people you follow and people they follow have liked.
There’s probably more things people would live that they would never implement because they want to force something else on us
Yeah for instance it would be awesome if 5 out of 6 times i click a link on kbin it could come up with an actual page and not an error
I don’t think you need the “what if” parts
Either start pitching realistic changes that can help protect the protocol or kindly stop posting this stuff. Everyone now has a pages long article all saying the same thing, and no one actually suggesting changes that could help.
At this point more people have spent time trying to figure out for Meta how they could EEE the fediverse then people have spent trying to make Libre fediverse better.
I mean y’all if want to spend your time thinking of cool and exciting ways meta can better extinguish the fediverse post it to LinkedIn and try to get on their payroll at least.
That’s my main point exactly. We all know it’s a threat, it’s been talked about to the point of annoyance here. We all have heard EEE here now. Anyone have ideas on how to prevent that from happening though?
Personally, I see decentralized IDs being a big one, one accepted account that can let someone log into multiple servers as the same person. That’ll lower the difficulty on choosing a server.
The other one, and this one I think may be controversial, but more and better feed algorithms. People want content that is relevant to them to be served to them automatically. Now we’re FOSS, and not ran for profit, so we can do even better a give people control over their algos, but I think most people would rather just click a couple interests and just get going and not have to figure out federated search and subscriptions before they do (not as a replacement but in addition too). The added benefit is we could potentially build a database of what a server’s network has access too and further help people figure out what server they want to join, so you get a little less dead Fediverse syndrome when you join a server that happens to block communities you would have been interested in. It of course could also be used to better refining searches in the first place.
Less feudal systems and more democracy for server admin, and community moderation I think will also help. Currently, admins and mods I think fall into lazie fair and organizers of the great purgers, it’s almost always been this way to me too. I think this will help make more server more aligned to their user’s interests and give servers a little more purpose for the end user.
More bridges! Matrix bridges (e.g. commune)! BlueSky bridges! Nostr bridges! Email bridges! SMS bridges! Signal bridges! XMPP bridges! IRC Bridges! More forum plugins and bridges! Q/A fediverse support! IndieWeb, just website bridges (good example bridgy-fed, but also the word press plugin! ). Meet people where they are. Make the Fediverse ubiquitous.
More selective federation rules, so you can have private server communities limit federation on per actor basis (Community/Group, User/Person, Post/Page, Comment/Note), maybe allow delays or rate limit federation, etc. Give servers and mods tools to be more granular on how they interact with the Fediverse so we get less ban hammer activity. This is most direct one to the current thread’s debate, but I think we need to do more than defederate. I think more servers should have a limited federation policy with Threads because of it’s size and influence, we want to interact with more people most of the time, but added where we need it and in ways mods and admins can handle (again more democratic systems could help here).
I also see a real potential for the fediverse everything app, but a big issue I see here is that the backend support is pretty tightly coupled with the fronts ends for most of the sites. At least there doesn’t seem to be a lot of reusue for the server and interoperability with multi UIs. That seems like the first real step towards that.
Some of these are problems for devs to solve, some for admin to implement, some are documentation issues, some are just the people that need to know about them don’t.
Dear God I Hope Not.
I feel like I see the same kind of post everyday.
Fear mongering.
I skimmed the article and it was a bit different from the usual “here’s the definition of EEE and what I copied from the history section of the wiki page”
I agree we need less of the above though
This has a lot of nonsense. It gives too much credit while vague regarding LLaMA2. It failed to mention a lot of Open Source work Meta has done lately. It was only from a US point of view and not how the EU has been a thorn in Big Tech’s side. Mastodon has 1.6 MAU and many users have multiple accounts. Mastodon is too small for Meta to care about. Those startups Meta squashed were doing innovative things Meta never seen applied before. When it purchased Instagram and WhatsApp there were many millions of active users. Meta as was many Big Tech companies a part of the W3C when AP was being planned and backed out. The Fediverse is about as old as Facebook so Meta has seen this before, Mastodon hasn’t done anything new on this front. Outside of that there are some interesting considerations
Not only all the things you mention, but I kept thinking "Well, if they do manage to make a pivot where they are nothing but infrastructure and still manage to please Wall Street, then good for everyone:
- Users will have a way to move out if they want to do so.
- Companies that want to keep a social media presence will be able to do it from their own domains, while not having to worry about the operational aspects.
- Decentralization is still preserved.
- Transparency is still preserved.
- By becoming infrastructure, it basically means they will become a commodity which will have to compete on price. Sure, one could make the case that AWS (and Azure/GCP) make real money by providing other services on top of their “basic” hosting offers, but no one looks AWS and think “AWS is locking people and charging crazy prices on S3 but they can’t get a compelling alternative”.
If anything, all these “what if scenarios” are almost making me wish that Zuck does pull it off.
Yeah, I think the reason threads is attaching itself to the fediverse is precisely because meta don’t see it as a threat.
It’s an easy way to appear open to the regulators without actually helping any competitors.
Sigh…
No. We’ll just make a new mastodon/ lemmy-verse without them. Its easy enough. At a certain point the world needs to understand that its these companies, not the format, we’re avoiding.
