I really hope this is a complete failure, like Meta itself.
Meta plans to work with ActivityPub, a vendor that already partners with Mastodon and is currently working on a deal with Tumblr. The agreement isn’t finalized yet, but has been referenced in press releases announcing Threads.
Lol. The author of this article is braindead and has no Idea what he’s writing about. ActivityPub is an open standard not a vendor. There can’t be an agreement because there’s no one to agree with. All they will do is implement the standard
It comes from Fortune, they can’t conceive of something that’s not a business.
This is brilliant in both it’s brevity and accuracy; and could be borrowed to describe their coverage of bitcoin when it first started to bubble.
Hello, I’d like two ActivityPubs please.
He’s persona non grata these days, but the old quote from Scott Adams applies here:
“I read a newspaper article about something I know very well—my own field—and it was so full of errors that I had to wonder how many errors there were in other articles on topics I didn’t know much about.”
If they’re getting an important detail like this so mindblowingly wrong, what else are they getting wrong?
Thanks for the link!
Journalists are not educated in anything except how to write. And they go and write about everything, aiming for an audience that is dumber than them. On top of all that journalism is an industry in contraction. Even the good journalists are paid as badly as teachers and they work under great pressure. Many of them are addicted to watching their click stats and not much better than a meatspace Facebook algorithm on legs. Is it any mystery how the end result is crap?
It’s used to be they’d say least ask questions from people who know. Now I feel like they only make half assed attempts to Google something.
What’s left of them are writing 6 stories a day, every day, so no, there’s no time left for the old due diligence.
Vendor made me laugh too. :)
If you spend too much time in Microsoft-land or Enterprise-ville, you will start to see everything as vendors. But in the open source world it’s different.
Exactly. Vendor my arse, it’s an open standard.
Does Fortune think Linux also partnered with RedHat, Ubuntu, Apple, Windows and everybody else who’s every borrowed from/made use of/implemented an open standard??
Don’t forget GNU
It’s Fortune. What do you expect? They all think in capitalism, and the very concept of OSS is alien in their mind.
ActivityPub is the best pub ever 🍻
I’m expecting FB to make some sort of proprietary fork of ActivityPub. I’m not quite sure what the point of Threads is, from Zuck’s POV, excluding the desire to eat Musks’s lunch, which is huge, so that’s more than enough. The man needs a win, bad, after that Metaverse flop heard round the world.
But everything you’d consider an advantage to the Fediverse is a downside to his business model, and the things it enables, like user-controlled hosting, don’t suit his ends. Maybe he intends to colonize this place, too, but up until very recently there wasn’t a meaningful user base to gain control over. Still isn’t. Mastodon got the biggest boost, they’re up to 8 mil users now, a healthy number for sure, but Instagram is pushing a billion users, so the number isn’t much to him.
So he’s not going to actually like anything about the Fediverse, or what it offers, nor will he like its downsides much. ActivityPub, as it is, doesn’t do him any favors. I can’t imagine anything other than the skeleton of ActivityPub getting repurposed into something else that runs Threads in the locked down way that Meta is accustomed to. He just seems to be grabbing at anything that’s loose for the taking.
I’m expecting FB to make some sort of proprietary fork of ActivityPub.
ActivityPub is based on a W3C standard. I found this license here, but I’m not sure if there is any protections against re-privatization.
I have the barest grasp on what “proprietary fork” actually means. All I know is that Meta is probably here because everyone is bailing to Mastodon, especially journalists. Fuckin Fox News threw up an outpost, they’re all there, the userbase is ramping up past 8mil. Meta sees that, and wants a piece of Musk’s market. The question is how, exactly, they are going to make the model become something they control properly, or worse, they manage to engulf the whole thing and somehow this all becomes facebook against everyone’s will. Hopefully they make their own walled garden out of it and we can all stay safely outside the cursed thing, being dweeby and free.
I don’t have the background to judge the situation, and I don’t like it. Somehow I went as far away from facebook as I could and ended up back on facebook, gimme a fuckin break
All I know is that Meta is probably here because everyone is bailing to Mastodon, especially journalists.
I wouldn’t exactly say that everybody is bailing on Mastodon. I don’t like the Twitter format, but a lot of people prefer that over a threaded set up like Reddit/Lemmy/Threads. Right now, the only other option is Twitter, and Musk is actively burning that to the ground.
I just wish Mastodon would stop catering to mobile people and give me browser width space that’s not the size of a large potato.
Fuckin Fox News threw up an outpost, they’re all there, the userbase is ramping up past 8mil.
Right-wing assholes gonna asshole their way into the platform with the most corporate influence, while still pretending they are “rebelling” and “sticking it to the man”. Fox News are the Kings of Astroturfing. Not surprising at all.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=D24DhiiO33s
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
This completely contrasts the idea of decentralizing the Fediverse.
And it’s so beautiful and ironical
In other words, meta wants to metastasize.
The fediverse is like 2 to 3 million, Threads is about to hit 100 million. Instagram has billions. Something telling me that redesigning their entire infrastructure just to attempt to absorb that little amount of people who are known to be hostile towards them, is not their actual goal. Yet the fedi seems to think this makes sense somehow.
This!!! The expense of accommodating the fediverse would be more than the potential revenue gained by a very large margin.
Finally, someone is not insane. Thank you
It makes way more sense to me that the experiment with federation will ultimately be to connect their own services. For example, so you can follow an instagram thot from your facebook, or you can message someone on whatsapp using facebook messenger.
They definitely don’t need the ActivityPub for that
No, but google didn’t need to do XMPP to create a messenger either.
That’s why they use SMS/RCS lol
Developers would also be able to build their own features and set their own content moderation policies and standards for their respective servers. Meta bills this new capability as a way to protect people
So Meta is keenly aware of this and totally won’t use it as a way to attract and funnel users onto their servers until one day they decide to take everyone and leave.
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Appeals to fallacies, but refuses to consider the most reasonable form of the argument and instead assumes ‘everyone’ doesn’t mean ‘enough people that the rest don’t matter’.
In fairness, I think we might already be the rest who don’t matter. Threads has just passed 100 million users in like three days. The entire fediverse, in about ten years (it’s tough to pin down an exact start date because “When did it become the fediverse?”), has accrued around 12 million users, of which less than 4 million are active. There’s any number of things Meta might want, but I don’t think greater access to 4 million geeks is at the top of their list.
I do think the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns have some merit. Meta isn’t threatened by the fediverse now, but maybe they do want to kill it before it becomes a problem. In the short term, though, we’re not overtaking Threads. Personally, I think another plausible theory is that Threads is using ActivityPub to demonstrate that they’re not running a monopoly or gatekeeping control of social media (which the EU’s new Digital Markets Act now regulates) by pointing to the fediverse–which will soon also include direct competitors Tumblr–and saying “See, we’re all on equal footing! We don’t control social media! Look over there at those 4 million geeks and whatever number of Tumblr users.”
Threads has just passed 100 million users in like three days.
Because like Google+, if you have an Instagram account, you now have a Threads account.
This is untrue. Threads accounts are reserved for the matching Instagram user, but those users have to actually choose for that account to be opened. If all Instagram accounts were auto-converted to Threads accounts there’d be over 1 billion Threads accounts. The 100 million Threads users are all people who have specifically opted to have a Threads account.
yeah, but to be fair we don’t have a good number of those who opted out because to delete the Threads account you have to delete your Instagram account.
A significant number may simple have noped out after seeing no follow feed.
Definitely. Meta is studiously only sharing the number of accounts registered. We have no idea how many of those are active. If we go with the old 1-9-90 rule, only about 10 million of those 100 million will become active users. Although, the rule obviously isn’t a universal constant. On the fediverse, for example, it’s closer to ⅓ of registered users that are active.
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When we’ve already seen this strategy play out in the form of Microsoft’s great EEE, it’s hard not to assume malevolent intentions when a mega-corporation suddenly starts getting buddy-buddy with the indies (who are creating an adjacent product) out of nowhere.
You don’t chop down a big tree on one go. You chop, chop, chop away over and over until eventually the trunk is too weak to support the rest of the tree.
If they can pull enough users and developers away from the Fediverse and ActivityPub, then it’ll kill off (or extinguish) the whole thing.
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Zuck is not some mastermind engineer.
Meta is not just Zuck. It is a rapacious corporation.
Plus, while it takes a smart man to build a house, any old idiot can knock it down
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If you want the fediverse to work, you have to accept that large companies will want to be part of it.
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Then the fediverse will fade into obscurity. I know it’s hard to accept but walling yourself off from everybody else is not the right way to go.
I know it’s hard to accept, but we can have nice things independent of big business.
Ribbit
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It’s kinda already fine right now.
But it works now
But mega corporations will eventually want to crush the competition, which means making everyone else’s experience worse. I guess that somehow hasn’t happened to email, but for most everything else
I agree, they need to be kept in check. It’s sad the fediverse isn’t big enough to force them to behave. Ultimately though, if federated services continue to be hard to understand for the average user, people will slowly leave so that they can interact with normal people.
Hopefully development can continue without Facebook providing input that starts making them essential like Google did with Android. So Facebook can be ignored and just be free to use the tools, but left to be on its own from those that don’t want to deal with them.
Google is already doing shitty work to android though: they’re removing some basic apps (dialer and contacts) from the open-sourced part of it.
It’s working already and we aren’t a company that needs to grow endlessly, I rather be smaller and high quality than be take over by the bots on threads and meta.
This. Anything with a million users is chock full of megacorps. The noteworthy bit is that this isn’t run exclusively by one of them.
And, making places they have no part in is trivially easy. IF FB attempts to federate with other fediverse services, they can be defederated by anyone that cares to.
There are lots of humans (the big hairless apes who create everything of value that happens on the internet), who do not want to be a part of Meta’s network. Those humans (that’s us) can always make a place for themselves. The last few weeks have proven that there are enough of us for the community to hit the necessary scale. Unless FB starts doing murders, that will not change for quite a while.
I do not understand the freak out here over threads, this is not an existential threat. At worst it is a reminder that we will not “win” the war, but it’s a war that we should even bother show up for.
Bluesky creating a competing standard is far worse than meta implementing the existing one.
Exactly, it’s overblown is what it is! Many concerns are legitimate, but the beauty of the fediverse is that if you don’t like a site that uses it then such sites are super easy to avoid by joining/making an instance that’s defedded from it. We need to realize that Lemmy is not Reddit, we don’t have to all use the same site anymore. This, along with yesterday’s griefing of lemmy.world, should serve as an example of why we shouldn’t just know of this new power to create and sub to communities on other instances- we should milk it for all it’s worth, along with the ability for most lemmy/kbin/whatever apps to have multiple alts across different instances all logged in at once.
Colonise? Lol. I’m pretty sure meta doesn’t care that much about us.
They want to prevent us from ever becoming an alternative to their platforms
Trust me we’ve done a good enough job of that on our own lol. I mean I love it here, but everyone I’ve shown this concept to is immediately confused and intimidated. Maybe it’s still early days, but it’s difficult for me to imagine this ever catching on outside of niche tech circles.
We need a homepage or something that lets you very easy register an account (maybe with a randomly selected large instance?) and sub you to some default communities. Something that someone can follow the instructions for for 1 minute instead of the 8 or 10 minutes it took me.
I mean I love it here, but everyone I’ve shown this concept to is immediately confused and intimidated.
I consider this a feature. I think nerds generate better content.
Unfortunately eventually more people will show up, because people need problems solved.
Digital literacy not being taught to the common people is by design: the less you know about how something works, the more vulnerable you are to being exploited. Big tech corporations thrive on this by guiding the folks to their walled gardens.
Federation isn’t a hard concept to teach at all, I’ve taught it to my kid in less than 2 minutes:
- you pick a server like you choose the address where you wanna live (has the kinds of things you’d like to interact with, be it communities or people), you’ll be closer to some stuff, like this market or that bookstore, but can still freely visit places further away (other servers) and meet to the people and stuff over there.
“And how do I know which to choose?”
- There’s this list here, just click the links and you can read this space here on the right side (in Lemmy’s case). It’s like you reading the description for which Roblox game you wanna play, for example.
Geeky people need to be able to teach at least just a little bit, I’ve done so for my family and it’s been paying off. Lots of us complain a lot about people being “tech dumb” but make little effort to solve the issue.
All while they’re the alternative to this platform.
Lmao I don’t think they’re ever worried about that. The fedi isn’t exactly new. Not to mention the mastodon community isn’t exactly gen z influencers.
Um, did you think colonisers ever cared about the people they colonised?
Good luck with that.
Especially when everyone is defederating from them.
I don’t share everyone’s pessimism at all. All I’m thinking about is hundreds of millions of people using ActivityPub who would otherwise stay on Facebook and Instagram. That’s a huge pool of new users for the protocol, and many of them will end up on Lemmy. This is best case scenario for growing an open protocol.
Maybe I’m just too cynical, but I think it’s naive to assume Meta is embracing ActivityPub out of the goodness of their heart, effectively giving free content away to federated instances with no strings attached.
I think it’s also naive to assume Threads users will migrate to the Fediverse proper and not just interact through Threads. The vast majority of those users may not even realise they’re interacting with people outside of Threads.
I don’t believe it’ll translate to a growing community, it may very well oversaturate us instead.
This is not cynicism. It’s realism. Corporations (especially Meta) have no heart, soul, or care for any externalities to the generation of profit.
The best case is that they will slowly ease into things by contributing to FOSS repos/projects while silently developing proprietary versions or extensions which wall it off.
I don’t think anyone suggested Meta is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. I certainly didn’t write that. They want to make money.
As for cross-pollination, it’s basically a law in SaaS now. When you expose users to something, some of them engage. Meta can’t hide the existence of other instances else there’s no point in federating. If users are other instances, and interact with users from those instances, some of them will create accounts on those instances.
My primary beef with
huge pool of new users for the protocol
Has to do with the scary-low number of developers working solely on ActivityPub, lemmy, etc - and lack of incentive for more to dive in head first.
This is NOT ready for prime time, and I worry that reliance on devs from Zuck’s army will facilitate EEE of the protocol. Slow and steady is better.
Pic related.
Exactly. ActivityPub needs continued organic growth, not to be inundated by activity from a giant monolithic, social media company controlled instance who’s heavily financially incentivised to wipe us out.
It’s FOSS. Meta is free to spin off their own version of ActivityPub, but we don’t have to join them. The entire point of federalised instances is to allow competition like this. If Lemmy devs are dropping the ball then other developers will compete for a better user experience. Competition rocks and I’m looking forward to it.
Nah, I’m fully aware of what FOSS is and does - but nothing in this entropic universe is permanent.
FOSS has gone private before (RedHat, etc) due to profit motive. I’m not sure I could resist several million dollars to keep it that way.
I don’t believe the average person who uses a meta activity pub based social media will ever know about instances beyond theirs and the options to create accounts to get non meta social media. The service will feel no different from Instagram or Twitter and to them just be another site.
The benefit will be more for Facebook to try and entice instance owners to find more users to datamine, and try to influence development in a direction that starts putting them in greater control like Google did to Android.
I don’t see this scenario of average people randomly seeking out independent non corporate instances to make accounts in and escape meta. Most are there because they enjoy the Meta experience and the large user base that all congregate there. Meta’s only play in this is an attempt to expand their influence to those trying to escape them.
#NOPE!
I would say more
#NOPE!
My response? It’s good to want. That much said, it’s not going to happen.
Gross
the more I read about thread, the more it resembles thread from the Pern fandom.
