Threads’ roadmap for integrations with the fediverse, aka the network of decentralized apps that includes Twitter/X rival Mastodon and others, has been revealed. A new blog post by Tom Coates, the co-founder of an older decentralized app called Planetary, details the events of a December meeting at Meta’s offices where the Threads team had reached out to members of the fediverse community to get feedback about the Instagram-led project to take on X with a decentralized app that will eventually interoperate with others in the fediverse by way of the ActivityPub protocol.
I mean I get why people running open source, small software projects are going to find it hard not to be convinced just by the fact that they are probably getting their ego stroked super hard by meeting with extremely powerful and rich people… but this is such a stupid idea.
We don’t need meta, they don’t DO anything. What does meta do for the fediverse? Sure you can argue it brings in a ton of users but meta is a for-profit entity and it is never going to truly bring those users into the fediverse. Meta has an absurd amount of money, if they haven’t committed to creating a fediverse like idea in the past what makes everyone think now is different?
Why is a massive corporation with the money to fund 1000 fediverse software projects coming to a bunch of volunteers for help? Seriously, think about it, it really doesn’t make sense unless meta isn’t coming here for help but rather to mine and extract the value here for itself. We have ALREADY built most of the software tools that a too-big-to-function tech company with a lot of programmers could help with anyways, it is far too late in the game for meta to do anything meaningful there besides speed things up a little.
If we accept meta into the fediverse it might seem like we are winning by technically adding a ton of users but for heaven’s sake people need to realize winning doesn’t mean giving all your shit to the other side. The fediverse will become barely any better than the current corporate social network world, so what is the point?
I mean, they are NEVER going to invest in a significant amount of human moderators, that would basically admit the business model of a for-profit social network is fundamentally busted. They will “try” to do it with “””Ai””” and also through underpaid employees in moderation farms in third world countries who are constantly getting traumatized from having to see all the most offensive shit… but it is never going to work.
The question is, why did you come here in the first place? For me, letting meta in violates most of those reasons.