How many reasons does Meta have to give before distrust is the default?

"Hey, admin, why can't I follow my mom on threads from your instance?"

"Because Meta facilitated genocide in Myanmar."

To me it's like warning someone to not stand in the middle of the highway, and having some guy go "don't tell me what to do, I have the right to disagree with you".

There are idiots in the world and their opinions are actually idiotic. :)

It's 100% super obvious that Meta wants to control the fediverse, and that's why they are coming for it.

Normally and with very many other issues ... I would agree with you ... but on this issue I'm very adamant about what I see and believe.

Think about it ... Facebook is a billion dollar corporation and they show interest in your little world and the little things you are doing and they want to join you. This is a company that already has billions invested in systems that already have billions of users and millions of dollars of man power and technological resources. Why do they want to step into what we are doing here? Why do they feel a need to step into our space? Do they need more users? Do they need help from us?

Big corporations are only interested in perpetual growth at all costs. They are also deathly afraid of competition or the potential of future competition. Look at the history of manufacturing, automotive corporations over the past hundred years ... it's a long history of the strong eating the weak.

I agree my argument may sound childish or extreme but in this instance it's pretty clear ... if you let them in, it's basically the beginning of the end for the fediverse.

It's the metaphorical Trojan Horse .... once it's inside and firmly established, everything will be lost.

Sometimes people have different opinions than you.

They're saying that those opinions are naïve.

I see you conveniently left out the bit where they said people could also just be naive. Kind of funny how you attempted to take the moral high ground and lecture this person like they were a small child, yet you yourself cherrypicked in bad faith just to have some little takedown moment. One of you certainly came off more childish and immature in this exchange and it wasn't the other guy.

This was the first comment on this post that made me feel like I wasn’t taking crazy pills. I agree completely. I still don’t see how Threads joining ActivityPub is a bad thing for us, unless it convinces a large number of people to migrate to Threads from their current instance.

Well he's not alone ... a number of relatively vocal "fedi-advocates" are positive about it too, even those who also acknowledge that meta/facebook are fucked and defederating from them would make sense.

Which reveals, I think, a curious phenomenon about tech culture and where "we" are up to.

From what I can tell, mainstream Silicon Valley tech culture has permeated out fairly effectively over the decades such that there are now groups of people walking around who consider themselves "the good guys" and have generally progressive political views and believe in OSS and the importance of community etc but are also fundamentally interested in building some tech, making it grow in usage and effecting some ideology or agenda through creating "significant" technology. Some of them seem to have money, or tech know-how or a network into such things and some experience working in the tech world. They're all mostly, to be fair, probably middle aged white cishet men.

When face-to-face with the prospect of having "your thing" accepted by and (technically) grown to the size of Meta/Facebook/IG, these people seem to not be able to even think about resisting. "Growing the protocol" and "growing" mastodon is what they see here and all the rest is noisy nuance.

This may not be the full corporate buy out worth millions, because they're "the good guys" and don't work for big-corps, but this is the equivalent in their "ethical-tech" world ... the happy embrace of a big-corp on OSS terms.

Which in many ways makes sense, except in the case of social media so much is about culture and values and trust that sheer "growth" might completely miss the point especially if it's by riding on the back of a giant that would happily eat or crush you at a whim and has done so many times in the past.

And this is where I'm up to on this issue ... both sides seem not to be talking about it much.

What is the "emotional", "social fabric", "vibes and feelings" factor in all this ... that a place, protocol and ecosystem, predicated on remaking the social web with freedom, independence, humanity and fairness at its core, openly embraces the inundation and invasion of the giant for-profit evil big-corp social media entity this place was defined against? How are we all supposed to feel when that just happens ... when Zuck and all the people on his platform is literally just here, not with some consternation but the BDFL's loud gesture of welcoming embrace? I'm betting most will feel off ... like something is wrong. The vibe will shift and fall away a bit ... passion and senses of ownership will decay and we may even ask ourselves ... "what was the point of coming here in the first place?".

Now, to be real, it's not like a big-corp connecting over AP can be prevented, it's an open protocol after all. But the whole thing would be different if there were open discussions and acknowledgement from the top about the cultural feeling of the disproportionate sizes and power here and the possibilities that it won't be completely allowed without a more decentralised model. Maybe Threads would have to create their own open source platform which people could run instances of themselves? Or maybe Mastodon could wait until the user sizes are more equal (though that's unlikely to happen anytime soon, which is kinda the point here in many ways right? ... that Mastodon is kinda giving up and saying it'd rather be a parasite on a big-corp in order to be significant than just own its niche status?)

Eitherway, it seems clear that many of the power brokers over on mastodon are there to create their own form of influence and this sort of deal with the devil is exactly the poison they're willing to drink for their ends.

For my purposes ... I don't think I'll want to hang around mastodon much after Threads federation happens ... the embrace from the BDFL and a number of users is just off putting and the platform is too crappy to care about it ... I'd rather just go back to twitter than suffer through that swampy egotistical place.

Yea I was really confused to read that. I’m on Kbin / Lemmy significantly more than I log in to Mastadon (I think I’ve opened that app 5 times in the past year), so now I guess I’ll just delete Mastadon.

I bet he’s getting a big bag of money.

It will end up being de facto EEE, the same way it's become functionally impossible to run your own email server. Sure you technically can, but the handful of big players block everything else and make it impossible to actually email anyone.

It'll be like that on the fediverse. Big companies like this will dominate the space, refuse to federate with most others except the big players, and people will realize that unless you only want a mastodon instance with like 20 people on it, it won't be worth the trouble.

Yes it is, but people are sheep. Wolf's come to get dinner.

Lol, as if Facebook cares about the Fediverse. With its 141 million users, Threads is already ten times bigger than the Fediverse ever was.

ActivityPub isn't a threat to their business, Bluesky is.