There's something like 50 million Threads users. Chances are there's at least a few people out there who would be happy to be able to connect with at least some of those 50 million people, without having to use Threads themselves.
As an academic, I would just be happy if I could reach my peers on Mastodon. I don't really give a fuck which platform they choose to use - I've chosen mine, and that's enough for me.
Furthermore, what's even the point of open standards if you don't want them to be adopted.
@sab If Threads plays by the rules, they're welcome, but if they fail to meet our moderation standards (as they likely will), we shouldn't give them any special treatment.
Also, federating with Threads might not be as big a prospect as we originally thought. Daily active users had fallen by 80% last summer when Meta stopped releasing official numbers. It could be that the numbers have improved since, but then why not make a big deal over it?
Absolutely - if they federate and it turns out to be a problem, there's no reason one should be more patient with Threads than with any other poorly moderated instance. But in all likelihood the slimy parts of Threads will very rarely make it to the feeds of anyone not actively looking for it.
@sab I think the concern is more about tens/hundreds of thousands of toxic bros from Threads jumping into conversations on the fedi. We'll know enough not to follow them, but they'll be able to find us.
The fedi already has every kind of hate and -phobia and -ism present, of course, but if the wrong people from Threads get involved, that could go up by an order of magnitude and push us past a tipping point where our network of volunteer moderators just can't keep up.
If a threads user is so hellbent on finding and ruining conversations over at Mastodon or whereever, it would probably be easier for them just to sign up for a Mastodon instance in the first place. I don't think Threads federating is going to make it all that much easier for the trolls.
This makes no sense whatsoever. You could want Meta to use ActivityPub, say it's a good thing that they use an open standard, and still say you have no interest in communicating with them and stick to services where they are defederated.
You don't have an obligation to read every email you receive just because it's an open standard.
There's no logical connection between services using activitypub and you bring forced to connect to them. So I guess at least that's a point to your free speech example.
So - counter-example. I'm working with a UK organisation that currently still uses Twitter. I'm trying to persuade them to start their own Mastodon instance instead. Being able to reach Threads users, in addition to Masto uses would clearly be substantial selling point of setting up a Mastodon server - given the size of the Threads userbase - and much preferable to them starting a Threads account.
It would be right now, but the first step of Embrace Extend Extinguish is that: Embrace. Opening up to threads now might be extremely detrimental to the fediverse in the future, in the same way as happened with XMPP.
By this argument nothing should ever interoperate with anything else because clearly that's the first step toward destruction.
I'm writing this on Firefox, which interoperates with Chrome and Edge. Oh no! We need to get these browsers operating on incompatible protocols stat, before they all extend and extinguish each other.
In reality, "embrace extend extinguish" is not a law of nature. XMPP is not ActivityPub. They are separate things with separate circumstances. Did you know that XMPP is actually still functional and open and you can download clients and servers that use it to this day? The stories about how Google "destroyed" it have become wildly distorted folklore at this point.
Maybe on your instance - it's your loss. But admins have a choice - defed from them and lose access to all those users and having actual content worth looking at, or federate with them and actually grow your network into something that has enough going on to make people interested. As it is, I use Threads right now. I strongly prefer it to Mastodon. Kbin comes close, but has less content to idly scroll through. If no Fediverse site I use supports Threads, I'll keep on using it.
A bunch of people are pretty disgusting on the established fediverse as well. It's just that nobody has a way of imposing themselves in your feed.
And I don't use Lemmy, nor will I use Threads. I use services that broadcas information with both - that's different. I made a web site once, that doesn't make me a Google Chrome user. I send emails with Gmail users, but I still don't use Gmail. I just co-exist with people who do.
I'll take a smaller volume of stuff from people who want to engage over the quality of mass produced lowesr common denominator content that will come from Meta products.
The great thing about the Fediverse is that you can choose that even if Threads federates. You pick what you engage with, which communities and instances you subscribe to and which you block.
I want to stay as far away from Facebook as possible, my actual private data is safe because the login stuff doesn’t get federated and there isn’t much of it.
Why can't you do that? Use one of the many non-Threads servers to do it. Like Kbin, the one you're already using. Nothing about it changes if Threads federates.
“DM me on Twitter” perhaps wasn’t the best way to start a post about fediverse, but OK, I got through it…
That article was a hot mess.
First of all, over half of that article was based on misunderstanding of how fedi and ActivityPub works. Meta will not just “push their content” out to the fediverse and drown it - even if they fully adapt and integrate ActivityPub (which was still marked as TBD in the roapmap). ActivityPub is not a broadcast protocol. There is no “global federated feed” that can drown you. Someone actually has to subscribe to users and their posts for them to show up on their instances. Sure, some additional messages will be “discovered” during that (likes and re-posts etc), but it’s not like all of Threads just flows into all fediverse servers automatically.
My timeline is posts from people who I follow. My local timeline are posts from people on my server. My federated timeline is all public posts from people (from other servers) that users on my server follow. It is trivial for me (as an individual) to domain block *.threads.net in my Mastodon user profile and then I will never see any posts from that server.
The chapter about content moderation was also a bit misleading. On fediverse side of things, content moderation is done by instance mods. If and perhaps more likely, when it becomes too much work to deal with, they will simply just defederate or limit Threads.
I’d imagine most smaller server admins and mods will eventually end up doing this, because they simply don’t have resources to moderate the message flow from a server that has hundreds of millions of users - this is already evident with mastodon.social and the other larger servers. Lot of places have defederated them.
But this is all working as intended. Defederation isn’t controversial, it happens all the time.
The actual moderation problem is entirely on Meta’s side. The fedi is full of bad stuff. Really bad, like CSAM. They will have to deal with all those kiddyporn .jp instances. Good luck telling that your shareholders Zuck.
There are some real problems with Threads integration, but none of those were mentioned. I don’t want Threads to monetize my content. If I post something on Mastodon and a person from Threads follows me, I don’t want Threads to show them ads based on what I wrote. But currently there’s no way to prevent that.
Also, if I should follow someone from Threads, there’s nothing preventing Meta from inserting an ad into that persons “Outbox” and therefore serving it to me on Mastodon. Sure, they’d be impersonating that user, but their whole business model is based on showing ads and datamining the clicks, so would be naive to think they wouldn’t enable ads on Threads later on.
Of course the last problem is easy to solve by blocking Threads, but you get my drift…
Hmm, that seems like not such a good look from Ernest. According to google translate:
I know, honestly it was on purpose. I noticed that forks sync changes immediately with /kbin. I wanted to check how they deal with this much-announced community-based qualitative code review. Answer: they can't cope. Quite an obvious bug was accepted in PR and domerged into the main branch :P It now works properly on the rifle ;)
Hopefully everyone can play nice and work together productively.
seems like you are saying ernest put thru an intentionally malicious PR to see what would happen? And what happened was exactly what is described? I mean, ya, thats what people will do.
It wasn't entirely intentional, it was actually my mistake. But I held off on pushing the hotfix for a while. It was a development branch, so these kinds of bugs were permissible - in this case, it just changed the order of related posts, nothing serious. It was quite easy to spot and fix. Slow and cautious acceptance of pull requests, something I spent a lot of time on, was the main accusation from the creators of forks. Hastily accepting them was a problem for me. I personally considered a consensus similar to that, but now I see it doesn't make sense. Someone needs to take responsibility. Personally, I believe that forks are the best thing that could have happened to the project.
It is good to really see your true nature now. I'm also think the fork is the best thing that could have happened for the community. It's a pity that you never started a conversation, but instead you still try to do mean things like this.
@melroy I don't think you can really be upset about anyone putting through bad code. According to the philosophy as I understand it, bad code (intentionally so or otherwise) is a useful contribution and you are basically soliciting it. You supposedly have some way other than code review to ensure nothing harmful gets through and it has to do with the reputation of the contributor. Since you already knew @ernest and clearly have a bad opinion of him, how did it happen?
I did not and could not review the PRs themselves. So I am just going on the information as presented here. Sounds like @ernest put through some code (either into kbin or mbin not clear on that) which he knew was not 100% highest quality but which error was not critical or devastating. And that it could easily be found and fixed. Partially he did this to learn more about this governance model. A model which has apparently been developed in direct opposition to his own. Is it approximately accurate?
If so, sounds a bit mischievous at the worst.
I really can't recommend Tyranny of Structurelessness highly enough.
Well I don't have a bad opinion about him (those are your assumptions), we just didn't agree on how a community project would/can work.
If however he did introduce intentionally a bug in kbin, just because of Mbin that's downright childish. The Mbin community does try to test all the incoming PRs (not just kbin sync PRs) on various instances apart from unit-tests, etc. We just do not want to depend on a single maintainer, hence a different way of working in the project.
He saying Mbin can't handle the kbin changes that is just not true (Odpowiedź: nie radzą sobie), at least we try to keep in sync (eg. for API comparability for upcoming mobile clients). But I'll leave it this, I'm not going to waste any more energy. I hope you understand.
Oh c'mon, don't be mad. It's just a wrong sorting of posts, it's in an edge case, and seriously it wasn't intentional. I just wanted to check how such management looks in practice, how many merge accepts are needed, etc. I didn't mean to do anything wrong that could cause harm. I even push the same code to my instance to facilitate your tests ;)
But you're right - that's just my nature. I approach PR with very limited trust, whether they're mine or from others.
I know your approach on PRs. Hence the main reason of the fork. The community does believe in their people and the good in mankind. Only 1 approval is required from another maintainer for now. We are using C4 way of working.
I assure you that I didn't intentionally push incorrect code into the repository. These were my first lines of code in a really long time. I simply got involved in other things that I wanted to finish first, and I noticed the edge case in the meantime, but it wasn't a priority. I saw that you were syncing and I was hoping to benefit a bit from it once you fixed it. I didn't expect the review to happen so quickly. By the way, I was genuinely curious about how this project management method works because, you know, I've always avoided such an approach. Merloy, you know how much I owe you, and I appreciate what you've done for the project, as well as the other Mbin contributors. Our overall visions haven't always been the same, and I think it's great that kbin has been forked. You see for yourself how my work looks until the release - there are many things I'll be refining over time. That's why I've put a hold on all other PRs, and now I want to focus on this.
@ernest@melroy
lol this whole conversation is a microcosm of the open source community. I agree with ernest that forks are great and would add that they show that the open source system is working as intended.
You are right. But was the whole debacle that lead to this fork being made worth it? Wouldn't it have been much better if Ernest had just sorted out all himself and we'd all be working on the same project together now instead of introducing mistakes into forks too see what happens? What a complete waste of time, especially under the current circumstances.
In hindsight maybe we should have responded by saying we merged your mistake intentionally to see how you'd respond.
i am not being serious of course, as that's not our community's nature. Even though it's allowed to gather proof, we (I am quite sure I can speak on behalf of the community here) would never intentionally introduce bad code into software which is being actively used.
Ernest, you have seen me before, pleading for you to change your ways, on all fronts. This, sadly, degrades the faith I have in your project being suitable for being used in production, from a pragmatic point of view. Kbin may be reliable, but you are not.
Ernest said he didn't introduce bad code on purpose:
I assure you that I didn't intentionally push incorrect code into the repository. These were my first lines of code in a really long time. I simply got involved in other things that I wanted to finish first, and I noticed the edge case in the meantime, but it wasn't a priority.
Ernest has said many things in the past and many times has not lived up to his promises. So I doubt this words now. Also he's already contradicted himself on this matter.
Yeah, that's true. Real-life stuff was kinda more important for me at the moment than managing the project.
For me, it's straightforward: I pushed some dev code that wasn't even a complete feature, and it got approved in your pull request. That's why I was advocating for everyone to only merged their own PRs in the /kbin repository – so that each person could take responsibility for their own work. I won't go on about this any further.
Real-life stuff was kinda more important for me at the moment than managing the project.
As it should be, always, for everybody, you won't ever hear me judge you on that, so please don't try to make me look bad by implicitly suggesting I am.
What you failed to do however is delegate, even temporarily, your responsibilities to people you trust. Instead you left people who trusted you dangling, only sporadically feeding them promises you would never fulfill. It seems keeping them on a leash was kinda more important to you than securing the future of kbin.
I won't go on about this any further.
I hope I'll never have to mention this again, so you'll never have to. Which would imply that you'll have come to terms and lived up to your promises, both recent ones and from the past.
Yes, I say this fully aware - there are many things that I have failed at. Much of what I said, I failed to achieve. However, I never wanted to keep people on a leash; I am more of a person who prefers to stay on the sidelines and engage in what brings me the greatest pleasure - coding, just like any other contributor.
Believe me, I tried to delegate tasks, had many private conversations and discussions. Perhaps it wasn't visible from the outside. However, in that mental state, the last thing I wanted to do was resolve conflicts among adults, and it all started to boil down to that. As @BaldProphet mentioned - "microcosm of the open-source community."
Moreover, there were too many different visions of the project, ignoring requests, etc. That's precisely why I decided to temporarily halt development, to secure the future of kbin. It was my decision, and as I mentioned, forking turned out to be the best thing that could happen. As you can see, the differences are not that significant, but it will be easier for all of us - especially since we can always draw inspiration from each other, and I don't think anyone has a problem with that.
However, I still maintain contact with many people, and sometimes they mention to me the attitude of certain individuals on mbin's Matrix - it is at least puzzling. In any case, I want to stay away from that and focus on my work with contributors who understand and prefer my approach.
Believe me, I tried to delegate tasks, had many private conversations and discussions. Perhaps it wasn't visible from the outside
I am sorry but I'm having a hard time believing you when you say that you were seriously trying to delegate, as not a single soul ever said anything which would remotely confirm this. I believe you had conversations, but they ultimately didn't result in anything in this context.
However, in that mental state, the last thing I wanted to do was resolve conflicts among adults
I am not sure how to interpret this as there were no conflicts that I'm aware of that needed resolving during your absence, everybody was just waiting
I am more of a person who prefers to stay on the sidelines and engage in what brings me the greatest pleasure - coding, just like any other contributor.
There's nothing wrong with being like that, there are other people willing to do things like resolving issues. Like me. I realize I appeared out of nowhere. As a new instance owner it took a while for me to notice, but when the situation became clear to me I was ready to jump in and help, just like all the other people who had offered their help (before me).
You've basically just admitted that you were either incapable of or unwilling to engage in structural problem solving and management of the kbin project. That's fine, but you should have reached out and informed the community as soon as you became aware of this.
forking turned out to be the best thing that could happen
Yes, forking can have positive side effects and perhaps having two versions in development synchronously can merit more than one. This however was not the proper way to achieve this and using it as an excuse to justify your behavior and inaction is unjust.
However, it is not too late. You can still do the right thing by starting delegation now, by clearly assigning multiple people to all essential tasks, and giving multiple people complete control of kbin.social, so that, should a similar situation occur in the future, you and the community will confidently know that the project will not grind to a halt again.
Then seek a constructive dialog with the mbin community and we can make the project, in it's current for, work. Together.
If you feel uncomfortable with or are have trouble doing any of this, as you've clearly indicated you'd rather spend your time on coding, you are always welcome to ask me for advice.
You see, I don't know how I would act now in hindsight. You have to take into consideration that, at the peak, hundreds of people willing to help appeared out of nowhere, people I didn't know at all. By nature, I am rather distrustful and approach new relationships cautiously - I really need a lot of time to get to know another person well. It's true that after some time, a certain structure began to take shape, but not everything is always as it seems at first glance - especially when so many strong personalities converge in one place. Perhaps it was a mistake that instead of addressing many things publicly, I tried to solve them in private conversations.
And you're right, anyone who knows me a bit knows that I have trouble asking for help. Sometimes, I take too much on myself, which is not good in the long run. I'm working on it. But this time was something more. I promised to take care of things, and under normal circumstances, it would probably be easy for me because I have some experience in resolving such situations. But these were not normal circumstances. I realized this too late. I was just overwhelmed by real life. So many problems collapsed on me that I could never have anticipated. These were the worst months of my entire life. I don't want to write too much about it or make excuses, but at some point, even getting out of bed or eating something became difficult. When I tried to get back to the project, the thought of the backlog and how many people I let down made me feel sick. That's why I'm really glad to be where I am now. I can only apologize to you and try to fix some mistakes. I need to do it at my own pace. I want to clean up the mess, find my rhythm, and then engage in broader communication with people. I'm still recovering on my own.
What I did was indeed a bit malicious, but I believe it was the only way to achieve the intended effect. The fact that I really like you all should not mean that I will be uncritical of your work. I don't want you to fully trust everything that comes from me - only in this way can we fully utilize the potential we have in developing the fediverse. Frontend errors are just a trivial matter; they can be quickly found and fixed. However, the situation is completely different when it comes to backend mechanics. Seemingly minor errors when I was developing karab.in made me undo them for weeks. With larger instances, there may not be a second chance. This is not a centralized system, you have to consider others above all. That's why I am so sensitive to it and have so many doubts about making changes.
It's not that I want to make things difficult for you. I really care about mbin developing in the right direction. I am curious about what the future will bring. I would like kbin to remain rather ascetic, subtle, and something that you need to learn and understand a bit, rather than having everything handed to you on a platter. Mbin can be a different face, with more features, bolder, and I know that you have many great ideas for it. A simple example is the labels for marking mods/admins/ops that you are currently working on - kbin has it marked in a subtle way with a faint left border outline - you can do it differently, and that's great. As someone very wise once said, "If it's not diverse, it's not the fediverse."
@melroy I am sure that this is just the beginning of our shared adventure. I hope you won't hold a grudge against me for long ;) Guys, I deeply regret that we met at this stage of my life, but as I say, all I can do is try to fix my mistakes. Thanks for everything!
OP here. I was intending for this thread to be about the mbin fork and its governance, not about kbin. But I guess I kinda got answers to my questions (in so much as they exist) and then some.
I have no particular relationship/loyalty to ernest or to kbin. Like a lot of people, I just got here. I may or may not stick around.
I myself am a person who tends to become intensely excited by new projects. I can come in with lots of ideas and energy feeling like I will be comitted for a long time. But can then loose interest just as quickly. (It's taken a lot of times around the block to learn that.) So I understand why a maintainer of an open source project would have reticence to bring me, or someone like me, into their project in a position of authority without enough time (months -> years) to prove the comitment and to demonstrate competance. In fact I would regard it as poor judgement to just accept a ton of input like that. Just accepting whoever is offering energy can really lead to a lot of problems. I've been on both sides of those problems!
I started this thread to ask questions about mbin because I'd never seen an open source projects described like this. The mbin folks came in not really to provide answers to those questions, but to make insults on how they perceive ernest's personality and moral charecteristics. These based on vague but petty sounding grievances. None of these posts do much to reccomend the project to me. Sounds like waa waa waa babies. If the main grievance is they weren't allowed authority on kbin main, then I agree with that judgment based on the posts here.
Hopefully everyone simmers down. Maybe mbin can define itself in a less reactionary way in the weeks and months to come.
Well then. I don't know what happened here. I was asked about this situation so I linked here, to find, to my surprise, that my final comment is missing.
This is a month ago now and I don't want to continue the thread, but also do not like my comments going missing. So here is my response to the above
I understand your response, if I would stumble across this just new I'd respond the same.
This situation had been going on for months and this was in fact the first time ever that Ernest has properly responded to a message, anywhere, from anyone, since he went silent. So I took this opportunity to ask questions and get answers from him. A lot of people had already given up or lost interest, but I wanted to know for sure.
I was undecided up to now, but have always expressed my serious doubts about whether a person like him is suitable as a leader of a project like this. Not because of his personality, I am sure he's an awesome guy, but because of his lack of professionalism when things go wrong. Don't get me wrong, I felt very sorry for him all along, he was in a terrible position, no doubt about that and as I've said before I fully sympathize with him. But he should not have dragged the project and its community down with him. I'm glad he's climbing back up again and with him his loyal supporters.
What this entire roller-coaster ride, including this thread, has demonstrated to me over the past few months is, sadly, that should something go wrong again, it will very likely happen in the exact same way.
That for me removes all doubt; I conclude that he is not a suitable leader. I am sorry to say it but it's the way it is.
There is no grievance, but if this all sounds like waa waa babies to you I can fully understand. People were not pleased by the bad code being planted so that kind of set the tone and I understand I sounded like I was trying to make him sound bad. Everything I've said to and/or asked about him is based on reality, however.
It makes sense to me it came across as reactionary, but it's done now. A lot was cleared up for me, all doubt has been removed. Let's all move on with whichever version we prefer and make this great project better than ever
Despite the fork. I hope we can learn from each other indeed. That will only benefit both of us.
Although we merge into main it's not a release, we use GitHub/Docker tags to mark releases. And use semantic versioning if needed for minor and patch releases.
Instead you left people who trusted you dangling, only sporadically feeding them promises you would never fulfill.
Now, you see, this is the part that I as an uninvolved observer who's just now catching up on the happenings do not get. Promises that were never fullfilled?
How long has or hasn't this actually been an issue? Because from what I can see looking at the codeberg commits, it seems like development stalled for how long, like a month or so?
I totally get not wanting to be left hanging and having some answers and pathway for how contributions can happen. But as you also agree on, I also get real life being more important and getting in the way sometimes. And in that sense, being out of it for a month or so does not exactly seem like an earth-shattering amount, even if it's annoying when it happens to be the project lead and not much can happen.
I just can't help but feel like all of this has been pretty impatient and premature, which also makes it hard for me to really understand the point of the fork, even if I can relate to the basic rationale behind it. But then again, I have no knowledge of the direct going ons and communications between the contributors and the events that led to this. So there might be a lot I'm just not getting.
The only reason I use WordPress is for the free web hosting. WordPress itself is shit. Things that would be very easy in real html and javascript are hard in WordPress.
Just because it's not tailored to your personal preferences doesn't make it "shit". For anyone who doesn't want to manage code, Wordpress is worth considering.
Personally, I'd like to maintain Wordpress locally and offline. Then each update exported to the server as a static site. I just haven't found a thorough enough tutorial online yet.
There’s no reason to not block threads. If someone wants to use it, they can go there and use it. There’s absolutely 0 need for the fediverse to have Meta anywhere near it.
Say Meta does get federated. How long until they begin making contributions to ActivityPub? Before Meta decides it’s a worthwhile purchase?
Oh yeah that’s my mistake, it was a plugin for WordPress, not ownership. It looks like it was co-authored by someone as part of W3C to be an internet standard, but I don’t know if that changes much.
It’s mostly that if something somewhere can be bought, Meta will try to. I don’t see any reason to extend any open arms. Just because something is open source doesn’t mean that ownership won’t change or changes can’t be implemented or influenced.
That aside though I also feel that any integration is just asking for an invitation to reckless abandon. I think I mentioned in the previous comment, what happens as Meta begins making contributions to the open source protocol? As people looking to run their own instances come across a Meta build due to SEO? Maybe Meta money starts getting thrown at W3C and the co-author - who knows man. At that point, are we just going to use whatever forks that get Meta’s stuff stripped out from it?
Why risk 100m Facebook and Instagram users for the “potential growth of Masto-lemmy” when it seems like the very obvious reality is that Threads would just leech users from here after some integration then “oops Threads doesn’t support ActivityPub instances all your communities are with us now sorry!”. Not to mention the imposed tracking, dark patterns and monetization - which from my understanding instances can set fetch authorization, alongside defederating it would mostly prevent the data scraping? However I’m not entirely clear on all that.
Anyway, not trying to claim that I’m extremely well versed in the subject or the specific logistics of how it works, I just don’t see a single reason to trust Meta or why there would be any reason to federate with them.
I also personally have no issue having separate spaces for separate things, so to me the integration just seems a bit much. Some people have told me that’s a positive for them, and that’s cool. If I could functionally have one and actually interact in full I’d probably just use one account too. I occasionally view microblogs on Kbin alongside my subscriptions, I browse through here (Beehaw), both slrpnks lemmy and Mastodon instances, all different accounts. If I were interested in the content I’d have made a threads account (but the posts I get shown from Instagram don’t really pull any interest).
If someone is interested in using Threads, why not just use it there? I don’t entirely understand the reason we would need Threads to be seen in the same space as Twitter posts and Reddit threads all alongside our microblogs and posts (if say, Reddit and Twitter were also to federate). It just seems so much more centralized compared to the nature of the decentralized instances, I could see Meta’s interest here being to make their version of WeChat. A space where you have Microblogs, Forums, Marketplace, and games all in one spot no need to ever use anything else.
I dunno, I just feel like the desire to consolidate everything into a single bitty package is asking for a disaster. And to an extent, I genuinely can see this being the start of that path.
Anyway, sorry to get so long winded. Maybe I can take advantage of this idea and develop an app to centralize your Fediverse, Reddit, Twitter, Discord, GameFAQs and any account you can think of all in one spot. Then you can just interact from all of them as a single master user posting from each individual account as you come across the content. Support for all that will probably get pricey so I’ll just charge for extended account integration, maybe I can make my own subscription based off this to cover the cost (/s but feel free to use it!)
I think I mentioned in the previous comment, what happens as Meta begins making contributions to the open source protocol?
Then you don't use their version.
As people looking to run their own instances come across a Meta build due to SEO? Maybe Meta money starts getting thrown at W3C and the co-author - who knows man. At that point, are we just going to use whatever forks that get Meta’s stuff stripped out from it?
Yes? We're already using not-their-version, without the 100M users. If it's okay now, it'll be okay when we decide they took it too far and can go fuck themselves.
Anyway, I don't have a horse in this race. I have a Mastodon and Kbin account, and I don't know if either of them plan on federating with Threads or not. It just seems like a lot of alarm over nothing. Saying that people aren't going to want to defederate from Threads once they're federated is the same argument people would use to say I wouldn't leave Twitter or Reddit, and I easily left both of those.
Right, we left there over much smaller reasons than Meta. If Meta is heavily involved in ActivityPub, where to next?
Yes? We’re already using not-their-version,
Right, but for how long would we be able to do this? If Threads does federate and get popular, even worse, the communities here get heavily integrated with Threads, wouldn’t it only be a matter of time until Meta makes a push to keep users on their platform over this one?
Then you don’t use their version.
We come full circle here, if you’re not using Meta’s federated ActivityPub, it’s a ghost town because the goal is for Threads to replace us. What are you doing here on Kbin when all of the communities it is part of is now over on Meta’s instance?
I don’t know if it’s as simple as “don’t use it”. This is Meta we are talking about. You literally can’t not use Facebook to get away from it’s tracking, they track you regardless.
I also don’t really have a horse in the race. I’m with you in that yeah, I’d probably find somewhere else too. But I’m thinking long term with our space here, regardless of whether 41% of instances are defederated, Meta’s involvement is a bad thing due to their immense wealth and, in my opinion, high likelihood they will implement changes that we can’t get away from. I’m not so sure it will be as simple as not using their version. I also don’t think it’s wrong for people to be aware and vocal about this, even if it may not immediately affect us in the moment. Again, we left Reddit over basically the complete inverse of this situation. Reddit closing 3rd party apps to get users into their app vs. Threads adoption of these 3rd party apps to get data from these users.
Why would we be okay making it so that developers and users have to work around finding Meta-stripped builds when we can just… Mitigate how much Meta is able to do it in the first place?
When I said I don't have a horse in this race, I meant I don't much care whether my instances federate with it or not. You're not the first doomsayer over Threads, but I have yet to see anything that would stop this decentralized thing from allowing us to just de-federate or otherwise ignore any changes Threads makes to ActivityPub after the fact. We literally CAN not use Facebook. You may as well say Microsoft is trying to extinguish Linux, but I don't think they could if they tried. Yes, I'm familiar with EEE, but the things these technologies are used for appear to make them inextinguishable.
That’s not what I was saying, or meant to say. I was saying they are tracking you regardless of whether you do or not. Why allow that to extend further by embracing them into the fediverse? I also don’t think they are inextinguishable, I think there a wide, wide range of ways to fracture then consolidate.
Alas, time will tell and we can only hope it amounts to nothing and all us worrywarts are proven wrong as Meta does nothing but integrate then occasionally serve ads (with of course, all the background tracking).
Out of curiosity and completely unrelated, do you have an Android phone? Not Google? If so, it may be worth checking your active processes running under dev services, there may be a Meta Services and Meta Services Manager running in the background. It’s worth disabling these from the apps list, they literally don’t do anything but serve up ads and track you.
On by default through many phones and carriers, gotta love it.
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