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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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Because companies like Meta embrace, extend and extinguish.
Only if people voluntarily give up their privacy and switch to a threads account/app, right? I mean ultimately the argument is that Meta will develop features so cool that we’ll all give up our privacy for them?
Idk, it just seems like if that’s the fear, I think it will happen regardless and even defederating won’t really stop that. I feel like people will just make new accounts wherever the cool place to be is.
I’m all for defederating just because you don’t want to see or associate with that content though, that totally make sense.
Well, Meta said it already has 53 million sign ups for threads.
why do you think they care enough about the comparatively tiny amount here in the fediverse to do the whole embrace-extinguish stuff?
Same reason Spez is still doing damage control over 3% of his userbase leaving, up to and including signing up more bots to boost traffic and denounce the protests. It's not like he's losing a whole lot, he's kept multimillions of users (human and otherwise) to make his shareholders happy and his site will stumble along pretty ok for years. But in capitalism, especially the ad-driven digital sphere, eyes are everything.
Federating with the rest of us IS a blip in the grand scheme, but so was 3%. The fediverse existing outside of Threads carries the very significant risk that their users will sign up for their service and see the other platforms that are just as nice without being ad-soaked, subscription-based, and demanding your real name while they sell every ounce of your info.
One of us is going to be leeching users from the other and meta will not like this, so they're liable to make damn sure it's them. It wouldn't really shock me to see them neglect to upkeep federation with non-meta instances while they attempt to charm users away with a recognizable, high-traffic platform full of bells and whistles.
EEE doesn't need to be an intentional attack. They only seek profit.
You know Facebook has released a ton as open source, right?
Edit: ever heard of React? Facebook. Pytorch? Facebook. GraphQL? Facebook. Llama? Facebook. Plus a ton of more niche stuff. Zstd, relay, fresco, hydra, redex, React native..
Edit2: https://github.com/facebook
The fediverse is virgin soil, Meta trying to get there before others is expectable, if only to poison the wells.
Couldn't any features they add be copied by other instances?
their data will (maybe) be available, but as far as actual features threads is a whole different thing
think of it like kbin and lemmy: we can interact between them, but if lemmy adds a feature kbin doesn’t get it
so if threads adds a feature, mastodon and the rest of the fediverse doesn’t automatically get it
actually pinned posts i think is a good example for kbin and lemmy: they both have pinned posts, but they’re slightly different and therefor don’t operate correctly together
Only if Threads is open source, but it doesn't seem to be.
Threads is convenient and people are lazy: a match made in heaven
did microsoft even do that succesfully? like i know that was the strategy, and its become a meme in the OS community, but didn't it ever actually work? is everyone using windows server software now, for instance?
EEE worked for Microsoft in short term, but that kind of strategy never really works in long term and the open alternatives end up better than ever.
Windows was able to secure some of the server market for a time, but despite that they never managed to eat into Linux's inevitable growth in the server market, and these days, Linux and BSD cheerfully exist in the Azure platform with full support from Microsoft.
Two other prominent examples of this are document formats and Java. Microsoft tried to introduce Office Open XML (.docx) as a competiting standard for OpenDocument (.odt), but they failed to even properly support the standard themselves, so now we have MSOffice-specific document format variants existing alongside OpenDocument.
Microsoft was pretty much forced to stay off of Java game for legal reasons, invented their own similar language (C#), then realised that keeping it closed was unsustainable and the open source implementation their research department was cooking up was the way forward. So nowadays C# is actually even more open platform than Java, and it's Java that is playing the catch-up game.
No, it never worked. The examples are web browsers, email and java, all of which remain open standards. There's a reason Google doesn't try this shit even though they own a large portion of the email and browser market, because they know it'll just piss people off and bring them in front of a judge for anti-competitive behavior and ultimately do nothing.