Some insights from Alex Stamos that I found quite interesting.
TL:DR;
He predicts the challenges will be as follows:
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Content Moderation: Enforcing actor and behavior-based content moderation will be difficult in the federated environment. The lack of metadata available in Federation makes it harder to stop spammers, troll farms, and abusers.
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Privacy Obligations: With Threads content being pulled down and cached by other servers, it becomes challenging to comply with right-to-data-deletion requirements, such as those imposed by GDPR. The Fediverse lacks mechanisms to enforce content deletion.
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Competing with Other Platforms: Meta may face difficulties in competing and reaching feature-parity with platforms like TikTok and Twitter while being bound by the feature set of ActivityPub.
Thoughts?
I’m wondering what their motivation was for building it so that it could join the fediverse. I guess they recognize that the fediverse is the future, and they want their hand in that space.
The most compelling theory is that it’s a way of avoiding regulatory control for being a monopoly. Otherwise, their actions make it pretty clear that their target isn’t to join or even compete with the fediverse, it’s to go at Twitter.
That’s why they’ve launched now and are “promising” federation “soon” (I do wonder if the launch was brought forward because it was a good time to kick Twitter and BlueSky while they were down.
Every chance that federation never happens or only when the regulatory danger becomes more real because Threads actually works out and gets a large sustainable user base.
Interesting take! This idea might play out in the courts if Twitter sues.
Don’t think the monopoly thing would come up there … it’d be out of scope for a civil suit between the corporations.
In reality, that court case is probably just proof that Musk is actually kinda shitting his pants over this, because it’s the first undeniable sign that he may have literally set 10s of billions on fire. No one can react healthily to that reality.
When he bought twitter, the possiblity that in a year’s time Zuck (and others, Mastodon and Substack’s notes too) would just literally build their own Twitters that would viable compete would not have been on his mind. It was objective mainstream truth that “Twitter” was the one and only “Town Square”. Interestingly, it was by taking that for granted that he showed the world how wrong that is … and of course, those of us old enough to remember the “old” pre-2010 internet already knew this.
Otherwise, the whole phenomenon of a big corp promising to federate and never delivering is kinda a meme now. Tumblr promised the same last year and haven’t spoken about it since.
Their goal is to consume the fediverse. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
The fediverse needs to collectively defederate with Meta the second it dips its toes in the water. If we allow it to metastasize here, we’re done.
But why do they want to consume the fediverse?
The fedidb.org site says the fediverse has ~10m MAUs (a lot of which are probably already on Meta)
Threads got like 10m users on day 1.
It would be such a small increase in users/content for them to consume and most of the people here block ads anyway, so I feel like we’re their worst demographic.
Threads got 30M users in a day and won’t even add advertisements until theyre on track to reach a billion users.
The idea that Facebook cares about the fediverse or extinguishing it is laughable. It is far more likely that the talk of federation is a) regulatory since they are under massive regulatory scrutiny around the world and subject to multiple court orders, or b) because one of the engineers or PMs leading the project is personally interested in the fediverse and wanted to build it to support it.
Threats are easier to squash when they’re small. We’re a direct competitor to Meta and similar services - a tiny one at the moment, but the potential for growth makes us a target. XMPP vs Google was a comparable scale. They weren’t more than a blip on Google’s radar either, but that didn’t stop Google from destroying them, and that all kicked off exactly the same way Meta is currently setting the stage. We can learn from history, or sit back and hope it won’t repeat itself… my vote is for the former.
I’ve heard arguments for federating and defederating with Instagram, I mean Threads.
Ultimately, Meta is going to do whatever drives their profit. So if they challenge Twitter, we need to know what will drive their profit, federating, or defederating. I’m sure there will be a lot of good content on Threads over time, just like Reddit. It’s going to be interesting in the next few years…
It’s open source so the base code of it is already there and it lets them attract users by already having content available. They probably saw an opportunity with Twitter going to shit, and had to push a viable product as fast as possible.
The solution to these challenges will probably be to de-federate from everything once they have successfully challenged twitter.
Great article. I especially liked the conclusion paragraph:
Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.
This makes sense to me. But why would they want to defederate? I get the whole EEE thing, to an extent, but how would defederating accomplish that as it would simply disconnect them from a big world.
- get on federated thing
- use corporate brand recognition and raw capital to get lots of users onto your instance of the federated thing
- lots and lots and lots of users
- “realize” that most of your users are only talking to each other, and maybe less than 10% is happening over federation
- (of course they are, you deployed all those resources to get as many users as possible)
- feel free to make things hard for the rest of the network along the way by being generally unstable for federated instances, since you represent such a huge number of users the rest of the network will cater to your broken nonsense
- leave federated network, citing “technical challenges” and aforementioned mostly-local-posting, causing everyone not on your instance to just mysteriously stop posting from the perspective of most users who aren’t keeping up with what seems like a bunch of nerd drama
this is, in essence, what happened to XMPP with Google
To prevent anti-trust suits. There’s a reason meta never bought Twitter even though it could many times over, they’d be brought to court for having the top three social media platforms. If they were going to enter this space they needed something to point to and say they aren’t a monopoly.
