When Meta launched their new Twitter competitor Threads on July 5, they said that it would be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon, and all the other decentralized social networks in the fediverse “soon”.
But on July 14, @alexeheath of the Verge reported that Meta’s saying ActivityPub integration’s “a long way out”. Hey wait a second. Make up your mind already!
From the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say “a long way out” is a clear victory for the free fediverse’s cause.
It’s almost as if the entire point of Threads was to use the Twitter hate to harvest more personal data with zero interest in creating an actual longstanding platform. 🤔
Threads is pretty blatant about censorship and sharing of user data. They use terms like “a friendly space” and “convenient” to sell it to users. So you’re actually losing something by jumping ship from Twitter. The one positive for Musk era Twitter was an attempt to reduce censorship, but the crazy things the company did otherwise far outweigh it.
One of the shitty things profit driven social media sites do is curate content to create a more advertiser friendly space. It even extends to special interests and government interests. I mean what do you call that when public information is curated by the government. I sure as hell don’t want my US government telling me what I can and can not discuss in a public venue.
In the USA there’s a little thing called the first amendment. Granted these are companies and don’t necessarily have to adhere to civil rights in the same way government agencies do, but in effect they’re doing the same thing. The US government should absolutely not be coercing these US companies into censoring content, which they are.
🙄 “Saying slurs on a private forum is mah god-given right!”
There’s plenty to criticize about Twitter and Threads, but the unmoderated parts of the internet are cancer.
Also pretending that Elon doesn’t remove things he doesn’t like is a joke.
I could have made that a lot longer, but I just wanted make a few points without creating a wall of text.
Of course there’s garbage you don’t want to see in a community. But the difference is there’s an actual human being I entrust to the task of removing it (the moderator). If I don’t like how a community is moderated, I can go to another community. Mods make these calls for the sake of quality and topicality of their particular community, not because of some ulterior motive.
This is in comparison to an institution of some kind using keyword algorithms to mindlessly remove intelligent discussion only because it may be against some kind of predetermined policy. The US government does this. They have official agents placed within the staff of major social media outlets for this purpose.
The only thing I said about Musk is that it’s a positive he tried to reduce censorship. I never implied that he removed censorship altogether. Twitter is still guilty of curating content same as the others. However Threads has flat out stated a full tilt censorship agenda.
I think they were ever only going to do it if Threads failed.
I think it makes entry into the EU easier, but they’re receiving headwinds on two fronts there. There’s no need for them to implement federation if they can’t overcome the other regulatory hurdles first.
Yep. Federation could conceivably respond to the EU’s requirement for interoperability – and they could do it in a way that puts a lot of barriers to people actually moving, so works well for them. Of course the EU would say that didn’t meet the requirement, which would lead to a multi-year legal battle and eventually Meta would probably pay a billion dollar fine (as they routinely do – it’s just a cost of doing business) and promise to remove the barriers (which they wouldn’t, and then there would be another multi-year legal battle).
But none of that works if the EU won’t allow Threads for some other reason!
Still, my guess is that they’ll figure out a way around the EU’s objections to Threads … we shall see …
Still, my guess is that they’ll figure out a way around the EU’s objections to Threads
I think it’s more likely that they’ll hope demand is high enough that the EU is forced to let them in.
Nah, what would be the point of keeping Threads around then? They’d shut it down as soon as user numbers got too low. Same as what happened with G+
I still don’t get their target audience for Threads.
Facebook users don’t want to leave their weird boomer Internet bubble. Instagram users will continue posting pictures on Instagram and advertise their linktr.ee account where they link to their 18+ content because they’re not allowed to link in directly from Instagram, and 𝕏 users … well … they will continue using 𝕏.
Ironically the only ones wo really care about Threads is people in the Fediverse.
I’ll stop when capitalism and governments no longer exist.
(By government, I mean the institution of a group of rulers and attendant enforcement, used to compel others to do what they would otherwise not).
Governments will always exist. Sorry to burst that bubble. They always have and they always will.
Lmao you think there were governments when early humans were wandering around the plains of Africa in tiny little tribes?
E: Downvote all you want but by the definitions being proposed here then all species have governments because they snatch food from one another, which is an immensely asinine description of ‘government’ since it describes and means effectively NOTHING
Called it. I’d be prepared to bet that in a few more weeks, Meta’s just gonna quietly drop the idea of ActivityPub integration all together. To me at least, it always seemed like the whole “planned Fediverse integration” for Threads was just them trying to jump on what they saw as the latest buzzword bandwagon.
Had Threads been released a few months earlier, you can bet they’d have been talking about “Metaverse integration” instead.
When a company says “a long way out” it often ends up meaning “never”. Fingers crossed.
