[HN Gopher] Thoughts on Threads and ActivityPub
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Thoughts on Threads and ActivityPub
Author : GavinAnderegg
Score : 37 points
Date : 2023-12-15 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (anderegg.ca)
(TXT) w3m dump (anderegg.ca)
| some_furry wrote:
| > The Embrace, Extend, Extinguish argument also falls down at the
| last point for me: Extinguish. This is a tremendous amount of
| effort that Meta is undertaking to try and... what? Stop the
| fediverse from growing? Defeat Mastodon, Meta's mighty
| competitor?
|
| Well, if the author had actually cited the people whose arguments
| they're dismissing, the answer to these questions would be clear.
|
| Here's one.
|
| https://emacs.ch/@ramin_hal9001/111579818136072605
|
| -----
|
| In case of the article being edited after I leave this comment,
| here's an archive snapshot of what I'm responding to:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20231215205458/https://anderegg....
| djur wrote:
| > after attracting a critical mass of users large enough to
| decimate the user base of the competing Mastodon network
|
| Threads already has 10-100x as many active users as Mastodon.
| How many more does it need to "decimate"? How much growth can
| you seriously expect Threads to gain from federation?
|
| > At this point, people begin to wonder what the point of
| Mastodon even is.
|
| This is already the case for many, many people. It's true that
| more people would end up thinking that if Threads successfully
| federates with Mastodon, but that's because the number of
| people who even know what Mastodon is would increase. A non-
| user is a non-user.
| colinsane wrote:
| > Google has, perhaps, the worst track record for chat clients
| and for killing their products in general. It's a real shame how
| Jabber/XMPP users were effectively "ghosted" by the far more
| numerous Google Talk userbase, but does this mean that we should
| ignore any efforts form big companies to support open standards
| forever now? Weren't things good while everything did
| interoperate? Is it absolutely inevitable that Meta is going to
| do something terrible with ActivityPub?
|
| FB messenger (back when each chat was a pseudo-window at the
| bottom of the FB screen, and not its own app) also supported
| XMPP. you can't say (effectively) "i buy the XMPP argument, but
| this time it's not Google" because the XMPP argument applies
| _equally well_ to FB.
| riffraff wrote:
| But I'm both cases XMPP is still around, if you care for it.
| Neither Google nor Facebook extended it in a way that broke the
| protocol when they stopped supporting it.
|
| I look forward to being able to follow my friends who are on
| threads from my Mastodon account. If in a couple years meta
| stops supporting it, alas, we had two years.
| petre wrote:
| They just used it to hijack XMPP users from the federated
| Jabber network onto their own platform. Google did at least.
| And that's what Meta is probably going after with Threads,
| growth using the fediverse userbase. Just say no and
| defederate it before they screw everything up again. Your
| next "friends" are going to be ad serving bots powered by AI
| trained on your feed.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > And that's what Meta is probably going after with
| Threads, growth using the fediverse userbase
|
| Facebook has 3 billion users, probably 90% of Mastodon
| users are on one of their services already. The entire
| Fediverse userbase is not just less than a percent of their
| userbase, _but less than 1-2% of their annual growth_ , it
| doesn't even make a dent in the first derivative
|
| It probably doesn't pay for the Threads servers and salary
| costs if they vacuumed up every last Fediverse user. At the
| bottom of all these EEE conspiracies is always a completely
| inflated sense of self
| petre wrote:
| That only proves they can achieve growth without the
| fediverse, no need to ruin everything they touch for a
| mere 1 or 2% and fake it for being cool and supporting
| open standards to get the regulators off their backs. But
| then it's all about revenue, infinite growth and user
| data hoarding.
| raydev wrote:
| > that's what Meta is probably going after with Threads,
| growth using the fediverse userbase
|
| This seems like a terrible play given how small the
| fediverse userbase is.
| goku12 wrote:
| Two federated protocols co-opted by them have a similar story
| to tell. Email, besides XMPP. Both still work. But both are
| impractical if you want to selfhost. XMPP lost a huge portion
| of its users. And the vast majority of email users are on
| just two providers who either send mails from outside into
| the spambox or drop it silently. The logical conclusion is to
| not let these big players on to the federated network if you
| care about the federated nature or userbase of these
| networks.
| keep_reading wrote:
| XMPP never had a strong federated ecosystem of users that
| existed outside of GChat.
|
| ActivityPub already has a few million users and a thriving
| federation
| SamBorick wrote:
| The biggest strength of the fediverse is that every instance
| operator can make their own decisions on this matter.
| Zambyte wrote:
| If they want to keep their instance up to date, Threads is
| influencing instance operators whether they like it or not.
|
| https://gleasonator.com/objects/95399039-9e07-497d-8414-f218...
| tedunangst wrote:
| Diffs?
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _The biggest strength of the fediverse is that every instance
| operator can make their own decisions on this matter._
|
| If you look at how Spotify applied this strategy to the once-
| open medium of podcasting and successfully redefined "podcasts"
| to mean shows on their closed and proprietary platform, this
| seems unlikely to matter.
| glenstein wrote:
| Exactly. I just don't see this as an either/or. I do worry
| about embrace/extend/extinguish, and I don't think "well it's
| an open standard" is an answer. See gmail.
|
| That said, it's better for them to be on it than not be on it,
| and it's great as a vote of confidence in favor of Activitypub
| over Bluesky's go-it-alone alternative that I find
| counterproductive.
|
| A little of column A, a little of column B.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| I have personally yet to see something that got better by
| fb/meta being "on it" (for an of course also very personal
| definition of "better")
| berkes wrote:
| > every instance operator can make their own decisions on this
| matter.
|
| Not entirely. "The fediverse" has this concept of
| "fediblocking". If a large enough group of admins decides they
| are very much against this, they will not only block Threads,
| but block anyone who does not block Threads.
|
| Basically strong-arming every admin who does not follow suit,
| to do as "the hivemind wants it to".
|
| This has some positive sides to it, but it's also a weak point
| in the idea of decentralization.
| capableweb wrote:
| > If a large enough group of admins decides they are very
| much against this, they will not only block Threads, but
| block anyone who does not block Threads.
|
| I don't think this is true. The instance my group is using
| isn't participating in any of the fediblocking/blocklists
| stuff, and hasn't been blocked by it.
| keep_reading wrote:
| They will be if one of the fediblock proponents decides to
| report you. This is not an automated process at this time.
| It's decided by a cabal on a private Discord, really.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I feel like it's also its greatest weakness.
| naet wrote:
| Though it's not finished by any means I think the AT Protocol has
| a really great future potential vs ActivityPub.
|
| ActivityPub is cool, but I think long term it will be a stepping
| stone to something a little more like the end goals of atproto.
| packetlost wrote:
| what makes ATProto better?
| etchalon wrote:
| Like the author, I never fully understood the EEE argument.
|
| The assumption is that if Meta convinces a large section of
| Mastodon users to use Threads, and then makes Threads
| incompatible with Mastodon, Mastodon, as a network, will suffer
| harm.
|
| But Meta clearly doesn't need Mastodon users. They've built a
| network something like 5x larger than Mastodon in a handful of
| months. If anything, Mastodon needs Meta.
|
| In my opinion, the worst case scenario (Threads becomes the
| defect Mastadon client/author and then drops support for
| Mastodon) just means Mastodon will end up back where they are
| today. A niche social graph for a specific set of users.
|
| EEE works as an argument when the target is larger than the
| malevolent force, but falls apart when the target is so much
| smaller.
| black_puppydog wrote:
| I don't think the assumption is that many peoe will migrate
| from mastodon to threads, but rather that people migrating from
| _other_ platforms will migrate to threads over "really
| federated" services, stifling growth of mastodon and preventing
| it from becoming a serious threat. Which is exactly what
| happened with xmpp iirc.
|
| And yeah, my money is on threads cutting loose from AP at some
| point in the not so distant future, at which point the whole
| thing becomes indistinguishable from "mainland" Facebook.
| berkes wrote:
| I'm convinced that federating Threads offers two major benefits
| to Meta. And that this is why they have no incentive to EEE.
|
| First, federating is a clear signal to antitrust-bodies that, no,
| there is no monopoly. With the EU shifting gear in this, and the
| US also pushing back at big-tech, there is a real "danger" that
| these companies will otherwise be forced to build interoperable
| social-media. Now, Meta is the first mover, and can do it their
| own way.
|
| Secondly, by federating, you give yourself leeway to block and
| ban people. If you want to block, say, the POTUS, you can now say
| "sure, but you can just set up your own instance". Where, in a
| siloed social media, you're practically blocking people's speech,
| with federation, you're saying: 'sure, speech whatever you want,
| just not on our instance'.
| nunez wrote:
| > Google then used this for its chat service, but then stopped
| interoperating with standard Jabber/XMPP clients. This left a lot
| of people in the lurch, and that's terrible.
|
| I mean, yeah, that's basically the thing we're afraid of!
| monetus wrote:
| Threads will be a boon to mastodon.
|
| Discovering the various instances or the idea of federation via
| threads certainly isn't going to hurt it. I am curious what kind
| of stress tests will happen with that many more people added to
| the network. EEE isn't meta's goal here though. The good does not
| wash out the bad, nor the bad the good, as stanis baratheon would
| say.
| flaburgan wrote:
| I think the OP and most of the commenters here are missing the
| point. Meta threat is not about killing AP or Mastodon. It's
| about mining your data and spying on you. That AP is an open
| standard doesn't change anything. It's exactly like SMTP and
| gmail. Sure, gmail did not kill the emails, they are still here,
| it's still decentralized. But eh, when you're sending an email
| with vacations pictures to your friend, it's enough that a single
| one of them is using gmail for Google to have everything. The
| content, the addresses, build a social graph of everyone, and
| mine, mine, mine the data to spread more ads or share it with the
| governments or... Threads is the exact same threat. If only one
| of my friend is using it, everything that I write will be
| received and processed by Meta. And I don't want that. Until now,
| I was able to tell to my non tech friends, come on my mastodon
| server, and I knew we would have privacy. Now I will have to
| explain to everyone that if they don't want their data to be
| analyzed, they should not add a contact from Thread. The
| fediverse was a safe space. Now we have to constantly be on guard
| again, and this exhausting.
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