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ELI5: Why are Lemmy users freaking out over threads?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five
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Meta wants to consume the fediverse.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
"There are rumours that Meta would become "Fediverse compatible". You could follow people on Instagram from your Mastodon account"
Are there examples of this? Or is this just the fear? This all seems like a knee jerk reaction to something we are already avoiding by being on Lemmy/mastodon. The point of having decentralized instances isn't popularity. It's to avoid the corporate bullshit, which is inherently less popular.
Corporations generally try to follow the three Es which is bad for the community as a whole
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Except it doesn't work and no corporation does it any more because it doesn't. Look at the two main examples, internet browsers and email. Both of them remain open platforms with viable foss alternatives because google knows that doing this sort of stuff will get them in trouble with anti-trust suits.
You know chrome is basically the only actual browser, right? everything but Firefox is a chrome skin.
Firefox
While other browsers technically exist, it is foolish to think that web browsers are a thriving diverse ecosystem right now, when 74% of all web-browsing is done using a Chrome-based browser. With their influence, if Google decided to start forcing changes on how websites function on a technical level, they could absolutely do that with little to stop it;- what are websites going to do, alienate a supermajority of their users?- And that is why people are so worried about things like Threads, because once a single company has supermajority control of a market, they can use that control as a weapon to get what they want.
I say this as an avid Firefox user: Firefox is niche. And the only reason Safari has 20% is because it is integrated with apple products, if it weren't for that, Chrome and Chrome-reskins would effectively be the only option.
They already are forcing changes.
They already do. If they want an api for their next web project, they just create it. Sure, first they offer to make it a standard but if others disagree, they just make the api and encourage people to use it. This is IE all over again.
thanks for dredging up the stats. also til Samsung has a browser. and I guess brave is a rounding error
Brave is Chromium and sells your data to advertisers.
Cool
If by examples, you mean supporting evidence that they will be part of the Fediverse:
https://fortune.com/2023/07/06/mark-zuckerberg-replacing-metaverse-with-twitter-killer-threads-fediverse/
https://www.slashgear.com/1332608/meta-threads-fediverse-new-explained/
https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/05/adam-mosseri-says-metas-threads-app-wont-have-activitypub-support-at-launch/
And especially https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Screenshot-2023-07-05-at-6.17.21-PM.jpg
It's not ready yet, but it's clearly on their roadmap.
Thanks
If any instance becomes large enough to have an undue influence, which Meta would likely have, then they effectively control the entire ecosystem. At that point, it effectively stops being decentralized (See: The 51% Attack, although this wouldn't happen at a certain number/ratio). When it becomes convenient to them, they can pull the plug, and destroy the rest of the ecosystem that isn't theirs.
It's exactly what happened with XMPP and Google Talk.
Can we not simply block/filter meta servers/communities from the clients we use to access lemmy?
Clients, no. We have no way (currently) to individually block an instance, nor would it be effective in preventing this problem. Threads users, as a whole, need to be blocked from the Fediverse, so that Threads is not viewed as a way to interact with Mastodon users.
Our particular instances can defederate from Meta, which would stop certain issues - but not the EEE concerns that are usually brought up. It has to be a widespread block.
Maybe not in Lemmy but on mastodon individual users can block domains.
Also possible on kbin, which I appreciate because it allows granularity on a user-level.
The Connect app just got the ability to block instances, but that's not too usefull in addressing this problem.
If Facebook has over 50% of the users of fediverse on their instance and they decide to cut the rest off because we don't play nice with them it's not like we just wither away. The fediverse just splits in half where Facebook apologists are on one side and everyone else on the other. Basically where we are right now.
I'm sure there's enough people that want nothing to do with Facebook to keep our side of the fediverse active enough to be relevant.
I wouldn't count on 50/50 split. I imagine it would probably be closer to 90/10 if threads is seen as enjoyable.
A lazy search showed currently there are 6.5 million users in the Fediverse. A similar lazy search told that Threads reportedly had 30 million signups in the first 24 hours.
Even that makes me feel like we'd be in a hidden away corner of the Fediverse just based on sheer size.
Is that necessarily a bad thing though? Two things come to mind:
I wouldn't be surprised if even now with our 6.5 million users the quality of discussion here is far greater than it is on Threads with their 30 million users. Obviously too little users is a bad thing but I imagine there can also be too many. Back in my reddit days I much more enjoyed the more slow paced niche subs than the popular ones with 10 million subs. Replying to AskReddit thread with 1000 messages is a complete waste of time. No one is going to read it.
Are there really that many? Sure doesn't feel like it.
Keep in mind that's just registered users from what I saw. Not active users. I believe in terms of active users it's about 2 million. Don't quote me, that was off memory of reading a different thread.
I quote the lawyers: "it depends." Are you here for a more personal community? Do you love endless masses of discussion? I'm sure there more questions to go along with this.
For me as well, I never really participated much in Reddit due to the sheer size of most discussions. I do enjoy being able to make a comment that isn't washed into the void instantly, but I don't know how much that would actually be affected my Threads. There's a chance that the majority of Threads folks won't even bat an eye at the rest of the Fediverse.
What I'm more worried about is the fact that this is a massive, for profit, information harvesting corporation is trying to squeeze themselves into a five times smaller system. Why not start their own thing? They hyped up the Metaverse before, why not build off that?
I conclude that they see a way to maximize profits by setting up here. Be it as innocent as that they hope for more traffic from the Fediverse or something like hoping to snuff out competitors, I don't trust it. On the same level as I don't trust them with my data.
Xmpp was a messaging protocol though, is that really comparable to decentralized forums?
XMPP was and still is a buggy mess, and the reason Google unlinked it was that while it had a fraction of the legit traffic, it was like 80% of trolling and spam and other crap.
And Google killed xmpp? No, xmpp killed xmpp, if you can kill something that's already dead.
People started using other networks because they got used to
With xmpp messages frequently got lost with no error, different clients having different encryption and encoding settings, different ways to encode and decode media... A complete mess.
People using that as an EEE example are clueless, or stupid.
Also, if meta starts federating, it will eventually stop it for the same reason Google stopped talking with other xmpp servers. Because it'll be the source of most of the crap, but very little legit content.
Thank you for an actually reasonable explanation
Yes, because it was a decentralized messaging protocol, like ActivityPub. The problem in the end was not the 'OG' XMPP Users but the new Google Talk users and how Google treated the protocol. This, theoretically, could happen with 'the fediverse', too.
I feel like a lot of people are fear mongering
Meta does not want to "consume the fediverse" , it's not worth it. Threads has been up for a day and it already has 10x the number of active users than mastodon. Mastodon and the fediverse as it currently stands, is a blip compared to instagram and Twitter. They're doing activitypub so they can claim there's a free market and avoid any anti-trust litigation for owning the three largest social media platforms. If that means a relatively small number of people stay on mastodon instead of threads that's a small price to pay.
People keep saying "threads should join Mastodon because then the famous people will join it."
I don't want Trump and Tate on Mastodon, thanks. I don't want all the bigots on Mastodon, thanks. I don't want millions of people on Mastodon, thanks.
I love how it's like the "old internet" when it was about discussing your interests, not about influencers.
That’s a great article thanks for linking it.
I’m curious how many other tools have been silently killed like that or destroyed that we’ll never know about.
I’m still shocked about the mastodon integration… “free” services make users the product so how does allowing anyone without an account to interact with your platform make sense monetarily if you don’t have some nefarious long game in mind.
Just wondering, how does that affect other instances? The whole point of the fediverse is that it’s decentralized.
I could see that it would cause a problem if half the content came from one instance and then that instance de-federated.
People might move to that instance to join the communities that they were previously following which could reduce the content on other instances as they would probably only use one main account.
Lots of coulds, mights and maybes there though.
Here's another maybe: It might be a good if all of these content consumers moved on to another server. If they don't understand/appreciate the point of the metaverse, what are they contributing?
In this scenario it doesn’t matter wether they understand the point or not. The communities that they used to follow and contribute to aren’t available to them anymore so they create a new account that can access them.
They can keep both accounts if they want to but they might not want to do that.
Instances had problems with just people signing-up. Imagine Meta's server farms federate. Everything is smooth and bug free on Threads. "Sign up on Threads" because it's a convenient and smooth experience. Imagine the smaller instances loosing users. Now when Threads has lots of users they will decide to stop federating. They will take all their user with them.
I'm not sure I totally buy the conclusion here. It might have been the goal, but Google Talk or whatever died too.
If EEE is the end game, what can we do to fight back? Universal defederation probably isn't going to happen.
Google stuff generally dies quietly due to Google's corporate attention deficit in running product lines.
Meta, on the other hand, is sleazy but full of determination.
Like Facebook Poke? Or the Metaverse?
The metaverse is very much still chugging along, haven't they sunk billions into it?
The fact that nobody's talking about it anymore doesn't bode well if so.
Use various arguments like the existing defederations to pull users over to different instances?