I'm not signing up for Threads, but looking at some of the stuff other people show me coming out of there, it might end up just being yet-another-nazi-instance when they open up federation so might just end up getting blocked on those terms and not so much the "being meta/facebook" terms.
Based mastodon.art, I don’t use Mastodon anymore (microblogging isn’t my thing) but I’m glad I set my account there when I tried it. I remember the folks there being quite the lively and caring bunch.
mastodon.art is the single worst mastodon instance ever. the admins trick users into signing up so they can hold as much defederation power possible. .art defederates nearly EVERYONE.
It's not like "they" are some unknown quantity though, it's the Facebook people. It's not weird or unreasonable for people to not want the company that got fined literally a billion euros for data privacy violations just a couple of months ago to get involved in a thing they like
it's more like suspending someone who has engaged in bad behaviour in the past and is likely/promising to do it again. if you own your own fediverse site, you decide what the rules are and how to enforce them.
the difference between the fediverse and the corporate-controlled social media sites is that you can actually enforce your rules against larger companies on your own corner of the internet.
They already spread medical disinfo like wildfire, got someone who sold our state secrets to the highest bidder elected, and house sociopathic terrorists like libsoftiktok. That's enough.
What does this actually mean? That Threads users won’t be able to see content on those instances (and vice versa) once Threads gets its ActivityPub up and running?
I see a lot of of these instances citing privacy concerns, but everything we do on the fediverse is more or less open info. Unless I’m mistaken, Zucc could have already scraped Mastodon data if he wanted so I’m not sure how that’s relevant.
Now, if they were saying they didn’t want their users feeds to be flooded by Threads content, since posts there will almost undoubtedly have more engagement, then that would make sense.
I’m still on the fence about that being a good thing. I’m kind of looking forward to being able to see Twitter style content from major companies but without ads via my Mastodon account.
I wouldn't mind having the ability to send angry messages to them again, especially if me not following them also means I don't ever see their content in my feed.
Right after I logged into Threads, with a new account, by first 2 pages were posts from Zuck, Wendy’s, Netflix, a Facebook fanboy, and another Wendy’s ad. I tried to screen shot it, but the shit app realized I was idle, and used that as an opportunity to refresh the content.
30 million people jumped into this stupid thing this AM.
companies want to reach users, so they join Threads.
meta wants to federate Threads because it allows them to claim that they are not a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s new social media law and therefore not have legal responsibility for the content hosted by it.
a side effect of this is that I can view content posted by companies on Threads via a federated instance.
This is not necessarily the corp’s intention or them being generous. it is just a direct result of Meta using the fediverse as a loophole to get around an EU law and how ActivityPup functions.
I don’t actually think that this is an example of EEE because the Fediverse is not more popular than typical social media experiences, nor does it desire to become more popular or take over things like Facebook or Twitter. It simply wants to be a smaller alternative. I really think if it weren’t for the EU, meta would not be federating Threads.
EEE wouldn't work on something that is popular. The whole point is to destroy it before it becomes popular. Furthermore, corporations aren't okay with smaller alternatives existing at all. Their goal is to have a monopoly. Finally, Mastodon's growth has been really impressive for the last couple years, so I'm certain that other social media companies are looking for ways to shut them down.
The "gatekeeper" theory has some merit too, but not in that way. You can find the definition of a "gatekeeper" on the European Commission's website and I don't see how federation would affect it at all. That said, gatekeepers are required to "allow end users to install third party apps or app stores that use or interoperate with the operating system of the gatekeeper", and federation would meet that criteria.
Still, we already saw Twitter and Reddit move to paid APIs, and apparently that doesn't violate the DMA, so it's hard to believe that Meta would use a more open protocol without some other motivation.
Unfortunately that’s not how it usually works with major companies, and I learned it thanks to some post on Lemmy.
Look for “EEE”, or “embrace extend extinguish”
Alternatively you can read the following comment in this very post: lemm.ee/comment/776049
Threads is a twitter competitor by meta. They plan to eventually federate with the wider fediverse and to that end have contacted some of the larger fediverse servers like mstdn.social to do this. People are defederating before this happens because they worry meta will negatively affect the fediverse.
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