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this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Fediverse
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I thought the idea of Threads using ActivityPub was great and the exact sort of change that Fediverse fans would want? Most people aren't going to use Lemmy, Mastodon, PixelFed, etc but will likely be on board with Threads. Being able to interact with more people without having to use sketchy services sounds like a win to me.
You... Don't think Meta is a sketchy service provider?
I think the point was that we don't need to use the sketchy service.
The other problem here is that I don't think a lot of people actually know how defederation works. There's lots of takes like "I don't want Meta to get my data, so we have to defederate." But defederating stops you from receiving their content, not the other way around. Once Threads actually is federating, defederating it will stop people seeing posts from Threads users. That has its own merits, but it doesn't protect your data in any way. If you don't want corporate entities to access your online posts, either send them via some private end-to-end encrypted system where only you and the direct recipients can see them, or don't post them online at all. The Internet is on the Internet.
Now, a bit more of an explanation on what defederation is: while the decentralized nature complicates things (since different servers will have different defederation lists), defederation is closer to a Reddit shadow-ban than whatever it is people are imagining. If literally everybody defederated Meta/Threads, they would still see our content, but from their (Threads users') perspective, it would just seem like we're all giving them the silent treatment, because we never respond to their posts or comments.
Ah, fair.
No I do think they're sketchy, hence why I appreciate being able to interact with Threads without personally using it.
Nope Nope Nope.
I don't agree with OP creating infighting within the fediverse, but I really do agree with his points on defederating.
Have you heard of the term "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"? It was Microsoft's motto in the 90s to early 2000s of destroying free and open source competition.
The first step: "Embrace" meant to embrace the competition's protocol. Things like the Open Document Format, or in this case ActivityPub. They would make a product that used that protocol, pretending like they were contributing to it.
The second step: "Extend" meant to extend the protocol. They would divert from the way the original protocol worked, and adding more features that would attract the users on the original platform to their one. They would do this in a way that the original platform wouldn't be able to catch up and get feature parity with them, such as making their new protocol closed source.
The final step: "Extinguish" would be that when enough users migrated away from the competition's original platform, they would basically have stolen all the users, profited off the volunteers that made the original product, and made a worse, closed source, non-free alternative.
I know it's pretty fucked up, but this is an actual thing that happened, and it's not just Microsoft. Google's done it with XMPP, and Facebook is probably doing it with Threads this time around.
Here's some more stuff to read about it if you are interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Your typical Threads user isn't going to use Mastodon or Lemmy though and we won't be using Threads so I can't see either being extinguished.