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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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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.