I’ve seen a lot of comments suggesting Threads should be pre-emptively defederated by Lemmy/kbin instances if it tries to join us. I’m a bit confused what the problem would be. When Meta does its usual corporate bullshit over at Threads, how would that hurt a user or community based on Lemmy.world? If anything, wouldn’t it give the fediverse a boost if Threads users start discovering communities outside of Meta’s control?
I presume I’m missing something, as you can probably tell I don’t fully understand how Lemmy, Threads or federation all work.
There is a known strategy called EEE (Embrace, extend, and extinguish).
First, they embrace the open web. Millions of people who never would’ve joined the Fediverse (and, probably, don’t even know what the Fediverse is) flock to Threads and start to interact with us.
Then, they extend the open web, adding features to Threads that aren’t compatible with our servers. People on Threads don’t understand what’s wrong with our server (even though it’s Threads that’s the source of incompatibility).
Finally, they decide they’re “having trouble maintaining compatibility with third party servers” and start to break off from us, leaving us with no way to interact with our new friends. Unless, of course, we make a free Threads account…
Google Talk is perhaps the most relevant example of this. Here’s more details.
Great article. It’s pretty obvious to me now that the Fediverse should have room to grow on it’s own naturally. It’s probably in the best interest to block any massive corporate entity from joining in and swallowing it whole.
It’s interesting seeing how fast it’s already growing due to mega corporate incompetence, and I think the sheer desire to escape that landscape is driving growth now and we should nurture that as long as possible.
Wow, this is crucial reading. Previously I was basing my dislike for Threads federation because Meta but this has refined my overall stand greatly. Thanks for this.
That’s a great article, thanks for sharing
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This part:
From the EEE wikipedia page has given me PTSD.
I was required to implement this (IMAP with OAuth2) “simple change” but for a server backend service that checked an inbox to perform certain actions. That was certainly fun. In the end the solution wasn’t that difficult, but finding it and working it into legacy code…
The XMPP stories/comparisons are such bullshit, imho.
Sure, both Google and Facebook both used XMPP for a while (even at the same time, so you could message someone from Google on Facebook), but XMPP was an unpopular niche protocol before that and it’s still the same today. I used to be an uber (foss) nerd at the time but even for me the appeal was close to zero - although I’ve tried it several times.
I’ve also literally never heard of anyone signing up for Google or Facebook due to their alleged XMPP 3E strategy. Google Mail was already the most popular and most hyped mail provider and Facebook was at its height as the defacto quasi-monopolist social network as well - everyone who was willing to sign up with them had already long done so.
(Funnily enough, the Cisco in-house messaging and video calling solution we use at my work, through which we also receive landline calls, is still running on XMPP to this day, so I sorta became a XMPP user after all…except I haven’t started this software in 10 months because fuck landline calls and we have better alternatives for chatting.)
You are absolutely right. Really getting tired of that one post about how to destroy the Fediverse. XMPP and lemmy/kbin comparison are not equivalent. XMPP didn’t have enough users to sustain themselves in the first place. Also google tried the same with AMP and failed.
XMPP is still chugging along on the backends of stuff like that. I’m not sure but I think WhatsApp has some XMPP in it still.
The most ironic one though is Jitsi, which is what Matrix uses/used (until they started working on Element Calls) to do video calls.
Yup, and I guess XMPP is fine for Cisco’s solution or Jitsi. But XMPP has always be used in a rather centralized way, the feature to talk to users on other services was always niche. And this centralized way has survived, where XMPP is used among users on the same server. Which is alright, but don’t tell me Google/Facebook killed XMPP.
XMPP wouldn’t be around even if Google never interacted with it. It died because that category of product died.
Sound to me like the worst case scenario is that some of the users gained in the debacle is also lost afterwards. Why would the users that joined the fediverse with a purpose leave for threads in the breakup?
The EEE strategy would lead to the big corporate entity being the way most people interact. New users would go there instead of other platforms to engage. In time, a lot of the users and content would be on the corporate platform because it’s the one that has the most reach, marketing, etc. so defederation would be a big hit.
And you don’t need to look too far to see it now. The majority of people posting on the threadiverse come from lemmy. world and kbin.social. Why? Because they were already the established “big instances” and they went there.
The average user will just go to wherever is the biggest and that will be threads. And when they have the majority of new take up and most people on the other side have the majority of their contacts inside the threads world, then they don’t need us any more.
This is just the way a corporation operates. Source: I work at a multinational corporation.
Yeah lemmy.world *already" consists of an order of magnitude more users than the next instance to it. Imagine if the lemmy.world admins had shareholders to please who suddenly start asking “why are you giving away all these ActivityPub activities for free???”
I can’t speak for anyone but myself.
I am not attached to the fediverse. The federated aspect is, to me, interesting from a technical standpoint, but irrelevant to my decision to be here. I’m also not particularly attached to foss principles.
I came here because I got annoyed at reddit. I’ll continue to poke around here exactly as long as it’s entertaining/informative. That purpose is not contradicted by leaving here for threads (it’d have to be a reddit clone instead of a Twitter clone to pique my interest at all, but leaving that aside).
So if, over the next few years, more and more of the content that I was interacting with was coming from threads, then threads split off, it’s reasonably likely that I’d want to continue interacting with threads. And if the majority of the stuff I was interested in was on threads, I probably wouldn’t bother coming back here.
A reasonable reaction to that is “don’t let the door hit you on the way out”, and that’s fine. But what could conceivably happen is that something like threads uses what has been built here to gain ground, then starts leeching away communities. They start moving to Facebook servers because Facebook has butt tons of money so the servers are stable, and besides, everyone else can still get there from other instances. Then Facebook starts adding incompatible features, which motivates more migration to their instances, and so on and so on, then there’s a split.
Now Facebook’s threads has devoured your communities, taken your users, and so taken your content, mostly just to jumpstart it’s own growth. To get what they are familiar with, people like myself stay on/move to Facebook, leaving the fediverse to rebuild the communities that it built in the first place, out of the people who care more about foss principles. While appearing to external observers like an inferior clone off the Facebook threads thing, to add insult to injury.
So the issue is that you wouldn’t lose just the new stuff from Facebook, but a fair bit of the preexisting stuff that sided with Facebook after the split out of convenience. What you’d keep are the people who stick it out out of loyalty to foss or federated or some other principle - and that may not be enough to carry on the level of content that’s desired, even with the fediverse’s “size isn’t everything” philosophy.
Of course, it’s possible that either a) none of that would happen even if there were federation with Facebook and everything would be fine forever, or b) all of that would happen even without federation with Facebook, just without the intermediate stage where there’s interaction. But the above seems to be the concern, and it’s not without merit (both because of past examples and, well, because I know I personally wouldn’t stay if the content were more appealing somewhere else and I don’t think I’m unique).
Personally, I think that with Twitter reeling at the moment, all the Facebook version has to do is be similar enough to be familiar, have good performance, and be easy to use to have a shot at that nabbing that part of the market (including users from the fediverse) - interoperability with mastodon or not. But predicting the future is rather difficult, so it’s hard to say.
There’s also users that potentially could join other instances but because of some exclusive feature Threads has, they choose it. So basically rest of the instances are bleeding users to Threads.
leaving us with no way to interact with our new friends.
The less innovation (avatars!), the harder it seems to justify the breakoff. 'd seek opinion of ActivityPub dev, is it easy to break the twitter era stuff by adding (what?) new feature
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