this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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I look forward to reading everyone's calm and measured reactions
My primary concern is that they appear to be allowing Thread content to be pulled into other Fedi clients, but not the inverse. So Threads content on Mastodon, but no Mastodon content on Threads. That’s not super great for Mastodon exposure.
Also, given the vast differences in daily active users, wouldn’t Mastodon become flooded, and eventually dependent, on Threads content?
You know what, I was very confused why they would add Fedi integration but unidirectional integration makes a ton of sense from a corporate scumbag POV.
Just defederate them and move on.
Jfc sounds like they're just paving over the community with a giant ad of themselves
Servers only pull subscribed user content, so it's not like the option is nothing or The Firehose. Meta can't push content into the Fediverse.
I think it's important to note that Meta doesn't have more power than anyone else here. They're just a large instance. They have the same forces keeping them honest as anyone else and their size doesn't change the incentives for mods and admins. Mods don't have an interest in working for Meta for free. If they're spending too much of their time moderating that content, Threads will be limited or defederated.
Given Meta's size and history it's understandable to be concerned. At the end of the day though, they'll either play nice or get bounced. I think we'll be fine either way.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I personally remain neutral on this. The issue you point out is definitely a problem, but Threads is just now testing this, so I think it's too early to tell. Same with embrace, extend, extinguish concerns. People should be vigilant of the risks, and prepared, but we're still mostly in wait and see land. On the other hand, threads could be a boon for the fidiverse and help to make it the main way social media works in five years time. We just don't know yet.
There are just always a lot of "the sky is falling" takes about Threads that I think are overblown and reactionary
Just to be extra controversial, I'm actually coming around on Meta as a company a bit. They absolutely were evil, and I don't fully trust them, but I think they've been trying to clean up their image and move in a better direction. I think Meta is genuinely interested in Activitypub and while their intentions are not pure, and are certainly profit driven, I don't think they have a master plan to destroy the fidiverse. I think they see it in their long term interest for more people to be on the fidiverse so they can more easily compete with TikTok, X, and whatever comes next without the problems of platform lockin and account migration. Also meta is probably the biggest player in open source llm development, so they've earned some open source brownie points from me, particularly since I think AI is going to be a big thing and open source development is crucial so we don't end up ina world where two or three companies control the AGI that everyone else depends on. So my opinion of Meta is evolving past the Cambridge Analytica taste that's been in my mouth for years.
You had us in the first half, but anyone who thinks theres any part of meta thats trustworthy is either paid off or an idiot. Sorry bud, but thats fresh horseshit flavor thats rinsing the CA taste from your mouth.
Facebook isnt even actually dead yet, youre 4-6 decades too early to even entertain the thought that meta is safe to conditionally trust.
That's totally fair and I knew that would be controversial. I'm very heavily focused on AI professionally and I give very few shits about social media, so maybe my perspective is a little different. The fact that there is an active open source AI community owes a ton to Meta training and releasing their Llama LLM models as open source. Training LLMs is very hard and very expensive, so Meta is functionally subsidizing the open source AI community, and their role I think is pretty clearly very positive in that they are preventing AI from being entirely controlled by Google and OpenAI/Microsoft. Given the stakes of AI, the positive role Meta has played with open source developers, it's really hard to be like "yeah but remember CA 7 years ago and what about how Facebook rotted my uncle's brain!"
All of that said, I'm still not buying a quest, or signing up for any Meta social products, I don't like or trust them. I just don't have the rage hardon a lot of people do.
Big difference between "large company tries to undermine its competitors" and "large company is working with people to advance new tech."
Meta is using open source to try and slow down its 2 biggest enemies in the field who have better funding and resources. That open source benefits the masses is incidental and likely regretful from metas perspective. They just dont have a better option to prevent themselves being left in the dust.
Ok, so hold the fuck up for a second - most of what you said makes sense, but then you anthropomorphised a massive company that has more influence on global politics than most governments, and could be fairly blamed for mental health issues globally
Facebook is, and was, evil. They do not have morals, they have metrics. Their metrics have not changed.
They invented doomscrolling, intentionally - this wasn't something they stumbled upon, they did unethical psychological experiments on users.
For example, they shadow banned users. They made it so no one could see their posts, just to see what feelings of isolation would do to engagement... Luckily it didn't increase engagement. They created invisible echo chambers and artificial controversy, which did work, and is now common practice for social media
Facebook has created some of the greatest open source software in existence. React and pytorch are two that I use frequently. They were first made while the company was actively experimenting with the power to manipulate democracy
Facebook has some of the best engineers, and does a ton of great open source work. They also have some of the most amoral people in positions of authority.
They're not the same people - the teams who do AI research at Facebook? Great people doing great work
The people who do social media at Facebook? Never trust them. They have a PR problem and are treading lightly.
They want to mine the fediverse for information on users. I don't think this is an EEE plan... But I think that every time this arm of the company finds themselves in a position of control, they ask "how can we leverage this?"
All great points, maybe my view of Meta as a single entity isn't a good way to think about them. I wasn't aware of their open source work outside of LLMs so that is interesting. Your right on with your assessment of what they've done in the social media space. I disagree on the point that they want to mine fidiverse user data, just because I don't think they need to do all this work to integrate threads into activitypub to do that, there are easier ways. But I think your right to be skeptical of Metas intentions.
On the other hand, big companies adopting Activitypub could be a great thing for the fediverse. So risks and benefits. I'll keep my neutrality for now. But you make a good argument.
Of course they're doing it to mine user data - their primary business model is to run platforms to collect user data. They then sell user data both directly and by running the second largest targeted ad network.
Their public stance they made when renaming themselves meta is "we found out social networks have a lifecycle, and we want to get ahead of the curve and create/capture the platforms people are moving to"
There's plenty more to say about Facebook and big companies entering the fediverse but I kinda feel like anyone who is reading this understands the issue to a significant extent
I actually agree with this take.
but is mainstream social media
If they opened as read only then they created API in a most convoluted way possible. If that ridonculous claim is true then I wonder when we see first third party Threads apps.
Me too! Just keep calm and scroll!
Came here to learn whether I'm supposed to like this
Do you like snarky Wendy’s ads?
...kinda?
Well you are not allowed to
Oh. Sorry, I'll stop.
Well that was civil
And informative!
Over the last week I've truly learned the depths of this and my researched conclusion is .. no bueno
did you join fediverse to escape big companies
Me, not necessarily. I think it will be a good thing when big companies run fediverse instances too. The point of the fediverse is to have choices whom (including which big company) to trust.