Polls on reactions to Threads (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world

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As you've probably heard, Threads (a fairly new social network from Facebook's parent company Meta) is testing integration with the fediverse. Depending on how you look at it, it's a great opportunity, a huge threat, or both!

Back in May and June, when Threads' first announced their plans, there were quite a few polls on Mastodon about people's reactions, most showing opinions split roughly equally. How do people feel today?

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[-] Contramuffin@lemmy.world 34 points 10 months ago

Definitely not. The same reason back then as it is now. Namely: I don't trust Meta to not try to destroy the fediverse

[-] whaleross@lemmy.world 24 points 10 months ago

I'm skeptical anything good will come out of it, but I'm glad if I'm wrong. Meta is about making money. The fediverse is a direct competitor to everything and anything they do. I don't think Meta is interested in integrating with the fediverse. I think they want to dominate the fediverse. But that's just me.

[-] Eldritch@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Capitalism believes selfishness is a virtue. And capitalists believe they are a benefit to society by being as selfish as possible. Anything good that comes from them is purely accidental.

That said, them connecting to the federverse is a much bigger risk for threads than it is for the federverse. We came here purposely to not be subject to them. They have no power over here. And next to none of us will ever be enticed away from here to there. However they cannot compete with the currently failing Twitter. And they need the dedicated long-term engagement. They have decent numbers. But only because they're pulling from a pre-existing user base. That isn't really interacting.

The main thing is to not get stuck in a self-destructive rhetoric cycle. Like people did with Google talk and XMPP. No one used Google talk for XMPP. It was just a nice side effect for a while that they interoperated. When Google closed it off they did not kill XMPP. XMPP still exists, and those of us that used it were weirdos in the first place who still used it afterwards. Threads may have a little something to offer. But we will lose nothing if they leave.

[-] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The fediverse is a direct competitor to everything and anything they do. I don’t think Meta is interested in integrating with the fediverse.

Right and this is really all that even needs to be said. There is nothing meta can do or say that will make this not true and there is no possibility that overtime meta won't make decisions according to this power relation.

The future fediverse we all day dream about when we are in an optimistic mood is literally a catastrophic fail state for a corporate social media company like meta. We see the plot of a happy uplifting family action movie, meta sees a horrific slasher movie.

[-] sour@kbin.social 20 points 10 months ago

was no

still is no

[-] MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world 17 points 10 months ago

Threat.

Whatever the stated reasons for joining the fediverse might be, the actual reason is to enhance data scrping capabilities.

[-] Donjuanme@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

It's silly to think they can't scrape data from where they are though.

What's to stop them from starting a tiny instance, getting all the data, and just keeping quiet about it?

The threads people are already happy to have given up that data, and if meta becomes a problem, defederate from it, or find an instance that isn't federated with meta threads.

[-] MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago

Which of the above sentences is supposed to make me think that it is impossible for Meta to scrape more privacy destroying data, if they go all in on the fediverse?

[-] 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago

Any data they can get from federating, they can get much easier by just scraping it. If your goal is data harvesting, implementing ActivityPub is a huge waste of money

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[-] Marsupial@quokk.au 14 points 10 months ago

I still feel strongly against it.

I’ll possibly end up leaving the Fediverse and finding a nice forum where I know corpos will never ruin.

[-] themusicman@lemmy.world 14 points 10 months ago

No need to leave the fediverse, just join instances which plan to block threads

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[-] ieightpi@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago

I'm so disappointed that it isn't an overwhelming majority of votes against federating with Meta. How do most people not realize this is just their chance to take advantage of the fediverse? And like haven't we heard enough bad things about Meta to avoid them?

I am extremely against federating with Threads.

[-] dumpsterlid@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

People in support of federating with threads keep saying we don't need to worry about meta trying to extend, embrace and extinguish the fediverse because the software and architecture of the fediverse makes it impervious. In other words, technology will defend us from politics, money and power.

It is a categorical error in logic to think that a technology can solve problems of the type: politics, money or power.

WE have to solve those problems by understanding how history repeats itself and how large corporations fundamentally relate to publicly shared resources irrespective of what the CEOs say or even think themselves. We have to realize you can't write a computer function that will stop a massive corporation from corrupting a collective human endeavor. Only humans can do that by organizing to collectively reject the membership of the massive corporation from the community around the collective human endeavor. As soon as you let meta in the door, you have lost a very important ideological power struggle over the fediverse's identity.

To those of you who argue that being against federating with meta/threads is elitist and comes from a desire of not wanting to let "normies" in who will dilute fediverse culture... I don't want to let massive corporations in precisely because I think it fosters an environment where a diversity of people, specifically minorities, are not made to feel safe or welcome. Most of the cool people worth actually talking to on the fediverse came here because they didn't feel safe or welcome on a corporate social network owned by a massive corporation.

If your response to that is well but what about all the normies that the massive corporation could rope into the fediverse that the tiny, pathetic fediverse will never reach? I return to my original point. This isn't a struggle over programs, code, software... it is a struggle of politics, money and power and we have to relate to it that way. To let a massive corporation into the fediverse that basically has the resources of an entire rich nation and think it won't utterly exploit and derail the future of the fediverse is absurd. If a company is publicly traded on the stockmarket, it is essentially obligated legally to do so in the pursuit of potential profit for its investors. We can't get the reach a massive corporation could give us without also fundamentally giving up what makes the fediverse a better alternative than corporate social media. It is a deal with the devil no matter what way you spin it.

[-] ieightpi@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Great write up. I really hope that we can pull this off and keep Meta out of the majority of the Fediverse

[-] DLSantini@lemmy.ml 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Their goal is pretty standard affair.

Claim to be simply making yourself part of the group for the benefit of everyone. We're all gonna be friends, this is good for you, you'll see.
Use your position and resources to make yourself the defacto way to use the tech. Bonus points of you can make the average person see you and said tech as being one in the same.
Once you have gathered a high enough percentage of the users, simply make changes or take other actions that will cut yourself off from everywhere else, effectively cutting off those users from anywhere that is not you. Since most of them are already "your" users, barely any of them will even notice anything change, let alone care.
Repeat previous steps for any new competing service that covers along to threaten you.

[-] farcaller@fstab.sh 5 points 10 months ago

isn’t threads already several times larger than the whole of the “fediverse”?

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[-] donuts@kbin.social 11 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

For me personally there are two main forces at play here:

I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don't use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.
Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it's a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.

I don't really know for sure, but I'd have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty fucking narrow. We'd be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it'd also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it...

So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.

I'm perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I'm willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).

From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.

From a cultural standpoint, I'm also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc.. Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase--and that's the Fediverse working as intended, imo.

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[-] Maddie@sh.itjust.works 7 points 10 months ago

I hope they federate

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.de 10 points 10 months ago

why do you hope that?

[-] Maddie@sh.itjust.works 5 points 10 months ago

I hate Reddit and Twitter both so I want the Fediverse to take off

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.de 11 points 10 months ago

Facebook/Threads will not be a good federation partner, same cesspool as Twitter.

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[-] sour@kbin.social 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

do you hate facebook

[-] ttmrichter@lemmy.world 7 points 10 months ago

Meta are war criminals. Period.

If you support Meta attaching to the fediverse, you are welcoming war criminals and their quislings to becoming part of the fediverse.

I sincerely hope most of us in the fediverse are better than that or I'm going to have to search for a new social media home.

[-] Marsupial@quokk.au 4 points 10 months ago

Meta has been a willing tool for enabling war crimes, genocide, political manipulation/propaganda, and brutal authoritarianism all across the globe.

[-] PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I don't like meta as a company.

But I don't want to exclude a bunch of people just because they decided to use a server owned by meta. It's not like the server is a community dedicated to hurting people or promoting hate speech or something, and I don't want to punish people just because they're not savvy enough to understand the problems with meta. Let them federate and just don't follow any of them if you're not interested in any of them.

Defederating isn't going to benefit us or hurt meta, it's just gonna hurt the people who use threads.

[-] ttmrichter@lemmy.world 9 points 10 months ago

But I don’t want to exclude a bunch of people just because they decided to use a server owned by meta.

I do.

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[-] antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 10 months ago

Your word choice is just bizarre. Nobody would be excluded, they'd only have to make a profile on a different, normal server. And nobody would be "hurt" by not having access to Lemmy's memes about Linux and similar stuff.

just don’t follow any of them if you’re not interested in any of them

Except that theoretically my "All" feed would still be full of garbage-tier content that people typically expect and post on Meta's services, and that userbase with its same mindset would eventually spill over into the communities that I do follow too.

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[-] JimboDHimbo@lemmy.ca 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Defederating isn't going to benefit us or hurt meta, it's just gonna hurt the people who use threads.

...Good. they should move their happy asses to a normal, non-ghoul of a corporation run mastodon server, if it pains them so.

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[-] Scrollone@feddit.it 5 points 10 months ago

Meta has a very bad track record, but on the other hand I would be happy to be able to follow famous people that are only on Threads from my privacy-respecting services.

I see Threads federation something like an RSS feed. It's not inherently bad per se.

[-] jacktherippah@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Does anyone know a decently sized mastodon instance that's defederated from Threads? I need to move from mastodon.world which wants to wait and see what Threads does. I moved to mastodon to get away from mainstream social media and I don't want any of Threads content in my feed. So please suggest some instances!

[-] infinitepcg@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

You can simply not follow people on Threads and you will have no Threads content in your feed

[-] jacktherippah@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

Doesn't posts that people I follow boost that's on Threads also show up?

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[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 3 points 10 months ago

I don't see how it's a threat. They can't take over the whole federation.

[-] rikudou@lemmings.world 3 points 10 months ago

Sure they can. Like Google took over XMPP.

[-] SamXavia@kbin.run 5 points 10 months ago

So how would they take PixelFed, Mastodon, Lemmy & Kbin / Mbin? They can only try add a feature and if the rest of the Fediverse doesn't like it, they won't add it to there own platforms,

[-] thenexusofprivacy@lemmy.world 5 points 10 months ago

It's not so much that they'd take it over, it's that they'd extend it (in incompatible ways) and exploit it. XMPP still exists and there are bunches of clients for it, but it's basically where it was 15 years ago when Google et al first adopted it. Ploum's got some great pespectives on the XMPP experience at https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html and there are a lot of parallels.

[-] SamXavia@kbin.run 3 points 10 months ago

So like I said, if people don't like what they add, we just won't add it. Why should we bend over backwards, also EEE is a Microsoft thing more than anything. It won't kill decentralisation it would just prove that companies like that are shit.

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[-] dallo@lemmy.kiois.net 3 points 10 months ago

More awareness is always good to take. That's said my own personal instance will defederate because damn meta

[-] newcockroach@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

The fediverse isnt a competition and nor we we should try to replace gaint companies(even tho that it would be great) rather stay as a free alternative to those platforms.

[-] Donjuanme@lemmy.world 2 points 10 months ago

I don't care either way, but I hope they'd be welcome as long as they kept their instance cleaned of the kind of things other instances have been defederated for.

If meta wants all the data there are plenty of other ways to get it, pretending the fediverse is an impenetrable shield is silly. And maybe more people will learn about the fediverse in this way.

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