Meta/Instagram launched a new product called Threads today (working title project92). It adds a new interface for creating text posts and replying to them, using your Instagram account. Of note, Meta has stated that Threads plans to support ActivityPub in the future, and allow federation with ActivityPub services. If you actually look at your Threads profile page in the app your username has a threads.net tag next to it - presumably to support future federation.
Per the link, a number of fediverse communities are pledging to block any Meta-directed instances that should exist in the future. Thus instance content would not be federated to Meta instances, and Meta users would not be able to interact with instance content.
I’m curious what the opinions on this here are. I personally feel like Meta has shown time and time again that they are not very good citizens of the Internet; beyond concerns of an Eternal September triggered by federated Instagram, I worry that bringing their massive userbase to the fediverse would allow them to influence it to negative effect.
I also understand how that could be seen to go against the point of federated social media in the first place, and I’m eager to hear more opinions. What do you think?
Companies invading the fediverse was always going to happen, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You get more users, a rock solid instance, possibly more support in coding, and maybe more. There’s no reason to have bots essentially copying content from a place that offers federation
There’s also definite downsides, federating could be expensive for smaller instances to handle all that content, potential pressure for more tracking/less porn/more ad friendly code built into the system, making communities better through proprietary extensions to slowly cannibalize the rest of the instances.
Blanket decisions to block corporate instances is probably a bad move, though keeping a short leash is wise.
But think of the type of content meta/IG is going to be creating. It’s going to be a ton of garbage self centered wanna be influencer posts. A never ending content generation machine. If the entire feed of IG was federated, the All view would be squashed with IG garbage.
Of course you’re gonna have “low quality influencers”, but if you’re attracting THOSE people, you’ve already attracted a massive audience of other people. Those low quality influencers wouldn’t be coming over in the first place if there wasn’t a massive audience to appeal to in the first place. And if there is a big audience on these platforms, then you’re gonna have the higher quality creators come over.
I make YouTube videos, but I’m hesitant to fully dump Twitter because I’m losing out on a critical connection pathway with my (admittedly small) audience. If I could know that a majority of my audience was on mastodon AND that I could collaborate with other creators in my niche, I’d fully switch over and delete Twitter from my phone in a heartbeat.
But I can’t do that because everyone uses Twitter.
Threads is letting people get their foot in the door for the Fediverse. And I think it’s really sucky that, if I want to reach the biggest audience, I might just have to make an account on Threads, because practically all the instances out there are defederating from it.
Lemmy/Mastodon et al basically exist on a principle of ethics that outweighs the desire of “wanting to reach the biggest audience”. People have deliberately chosen this platform over twitter and reddit, deliberately gone from high traffic social media to a platform with a much more limited userbase, because of those principles. Of course the hope is that one day this platform will grow as big or bigger than the old platforms, but organically and on its own principles.
It seems counterproductive to suddenly ignore those principles for the sake of traffic, just because a major corporate player suddenly wants a bite of this platform as well.
If you want visibility and a big audience on account of your career then by all means set up accounts on every platform you can think of, that is all part of that game, but don’t try to force this platform to become one of them just because of that desire for visibility.
