Adam Mosseri:
Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.
Let’s hope this isn’t the first step of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Although in reality it probably is.
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.
That’s not even true, I run my own mailserver for private and a business and it works like expected.
Cannot confirm. I have my own email server setup since years, with dkim, spf, and dmarc all functioning correctly. I score 10/10 on mail tester. My server has never sent spam (I get daily reports of all emails delivered, so I can actually back this statement up), and my emails go directly to spam 100% of the time on all the major platforms.
I send so little email they won’t even tell me why I’m going to spam.
For personal email it’s not such a big deal, I just tell them to check their spam; but for trying to reach customer service in a large corpo for example, it is impossible.
So what do you suggest, out of curiosity? I have the same assessment, it just seems like the only way it could work, long-term and for all users.
I think the cat’s out of the bag. There’s no stopping it at this point. And even if ever person who runs a Mastodon server got together to push back, defederated with Threads and BlueSky, and tried to stay away, it wouldn’t even be a blip on the radar for these big players.
To be honest, I’m not sold on federation in general for social media. I think it’s an answer to the wrong question. We’re asking “how can we make social media better?” and not “why do we need social media at all?”
Federation has shown itself to be extremely problematic. You have people coming and going from other instances that you don’t control and can’t enforce in any way other than to just block the instance. If I have e.g. a Mastodon instance based around a safe, positive space for the queer community, and others have instances based around bigotry, white supremacy, transphobia, etc. (which they do), then I either allow bigots to come and go, or I have to spend an inordinate amount of extra time on moderation. Same goes for Lemmy/kbin/etc.
People are also continuing to think with a limited frame of reference. The idea of federation is still “how can I get all my ‘content’ in one place?” because we’ve been dominated by these monolithic walled gardens for the last decade. Sure it might be annoying to have to have multiple logins for difference services, but I’d rather that over having a single place where Nazis can come and go as they please with few to no tools to stop them.
There is no way “EEE” is applicable here outside of spreading FUD. The biggest risk to the Fediverse isn’t Meta, it’s other Fediverse users.
The collective fediverse’s userbase is nothing more than a rounding error to Meta. They probably have to delete a magnitude or two higher number of spam accounts each day.
Threads is 50x the size of the Fediverse and is growing significantly faster. Twitter users are almost certainly their priority.
Meta is probably only using this as a way to convince regulators they don’t need regulation and so some director can put “changed the world” on their resume.
If anything, it’s easier to pull people over because their friends who refuse Mastodon/etc aren’t holding them back.
And the absolute worst case? Meta ends up contributes junk to the ActivityPub protocol or Mastodon, the community forks it, software gets patched to adopt the intricacies of whatever changes are needed to defang whatever controversial stuff gets added in, and everything carries on.
The most realistic concern is the communities that provide a safe space for those regularly subject to harassment online may start getting unwanted attention from trolls. After all, this expands the potential audience from 2 million to 100+ million.