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What should we do about Threads? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by NineteenDoornails@programming.dev to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.

However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don't have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.

What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it'd be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.

What actions can we take to deal with Threads?

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[-] panja@lemmy.world 67 points 1 year ago

Some food for thought from Mastodon:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

[-] PorkrollPosadist@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago

Eugen's naïveté is going to destroy this whole platform.

[-] Risk@feddit.uk 17 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'd like to see an actual explanation of why the Fediverse is insulated from EEE aside from 'Mastodon brand recognition'.

[-] 1rre@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago

I think by brand recognition they don't necessary mean "mastodon is a known brand so it'll be fine", rather that mastodon is a big enough brand for their voice to be heard... I imagine that it'll end up being like mozilla and google with the w3c, where even if one is far more open and collects less data than the other while also having fewer users, they still agree to and collaborate to create the same standards, and users can disable these

[-] tburkhol@lemmy.world 15 points 1 year ago

In the grand scheme, though, no one uses either mastodon or lemmy. I'm sure, to the devs and people who joined before 2021, that a couple million users seems like an enormous victory (and it is), but relative to a half billion twitters, the 1.5 billion instagrammers, or even the 5+M that signed up for Threads on the first day, it's nothing.

Those Threads users aren't part of Lemmy or Mastodon, they're part of Threads. They don't have to know what Lemmy or Mastodon are, even as they benefit from content created there. Once Threads is big enough, they either DOS non-corporate instances with mountains of data, disable those instances with protocol-breaking customizations, or just ignore them because all the biggest communities and content are hosted at Threads.

When mozilla & google started working together, Firefox was the majority browser and chrome a ridiculous upstart trying to squeeze into a domain dominated by IE and FF. The fediverse does not have mozilla's power in that analogy. I mean, fediverse may survive after that, but the commercial players will absolutely siphon off anyone who cares more about the user experience and content than about privacy on a public forum, which probably means the user base of July 2022, not July 2023.

[-] ttmrichter@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Half a billion Twitter users? At its peak Twitter had 300 million monthly users. Or are you talking total number of Twitter accounts, even the ones that have been lying dormant since 2016?

Twitter has always been an also-ran as a social media site. Despite being a "major" and "international" site, its peak user count was smaller than a lot of strictly-regional social media sites. Sina Weibo, for example, was until recently regarded as a failure because it had "only" 600 million active users, and that's a single-nation site for all practical purposes, against Twitter's "international" membership. (With a major cash and marketing push from new owners Ali, Weibo has grown quite a bit since those failure days, mind. It still has only about 600 million active users, but it's become quite an influential social hub at the expense of Tencent's QZone.)