Threads presents a serious danger to the long-term viability of the fediverse if we become dependent on it for content, and our best bet at avoiding that is defederation.
If Threads federates... it's part of the fediverse.
Even if you don't accept that tautology, sure, maybe the fediverse (not including Threads, which is also fediverse at that point, but ok whatever) doesn't do great, but kbin will definitely suffer if it defederates from Threads, once Threads becomes part of the fediverse federates does whatever you think it'll be doing that's not exactly the same thing as joining the fediverse and therefore becoming part of the thing that you think will become non-viable after the most viable piece of it joins. Kbin will become an also-ran within the fediverse, because most users will want to use tools that allow them to interact with the most people.
I guess what I'm saying is you can't in one breath say that "Threads will join the fediverse" and then in the next breath say "the fediverse will become non-viable" as if Threads isn't part of the fediverse in the second breath. Let's not do "separate but equal" with social media, please. It's silly.
If Kbin defederates from Threads, it'll be Kbin that suffers.
This may be an issue of poor wording on my part. The idea I'm trying to get across is that if Kbin, Mastodon, & other microblog platforms that are currently on the fediverse don't defederate from Threads, the users on those platforms will become dependent on Meta for activity. If Meta then leaves the fediverse, activity will drop down to what we have now, only with people used to the activity brought by Threads and having all of the connections they made with Threads accounts. This will pull tons of people from Kbin, Mastodon, etc. and essentially kill the open fediverse with very little hope of it growing again.
And to be clear, Meta has tons of incentive to do this. Meta is a profit-driven company. They want as many people as possible on their platforms, not on Mastodon or on Kbin or on Firefish or on Misskey. The open, widely distributed fediverse that we strive for goes against Meta's motives. Just as they'd have everyone on the Metaverse if he could, Zuckerberg will absolutely pull people from Kbin onto Threads if he gets the chance, and he will get that chance if we decide to put the content pool in the hands of Meta for the sake of trying to get activity as quickly as possible.
Kbin will become an also-ran within the fediverse, because most users will want to use tools that allow them to interact with the most people.
I'm not sure this holds. Surely if it was the primary factor in deciding which social media everyone chose, Kbin would already be dead at the hands of Twitter? Federation doesn't really change that argument if it's only about interacting with the most people.
That said I do agree that we need enough instances to defederate from Threads for this to work. If Threads overwhelms every other instance with volume and kills them, Kbin is alone and not really better off for having defederated. But as a pretty big instance, Kbin doing this is a major part of ensuring that the fediverse does not just become a collection of quirky alternative interfaces for Threads.
as if Threads isn't part of the fediverse in the second breath.
If Threads puts out so much more content as to effectively make other federated entities irrelevant, the character of the Fediverse changes such that it is no longer what it is today. Federation is meaningless if 99.9% of content comes from one place. Kbin would wind up as effectively just a weird third party interface for threads in that situation.
Let's not do "separate but equal" with social media, please. It's silly.
Is it meaningfully different to any other instance of defederation? Many of which I would say are generally beneficial to Kbin.
If Threads puts out so much more content as to effectively make other federated entities irrelevant, the character of the Fediverse changes such that it is no longer what it is today.
The lack of answer to the question "Why are Meta suddenly so open and willing to integrate with the Fediverse when they've basically been doing the opposite with their own products?" is a huge concern.
My guess is that they don't have an exact game plan yet, and are letting their naive, enthusiastic staff - those with no idea of the answer to the above question - do the initial scout and integration work with a view to see how it can be perverted for Meta's profit/benefit in future.
Meta probably wouldn't use the word "perverted", but from an outside perspective that's what it'd be.
My thinking here is exactly the same as in comments I posted about Microsoft's embrace of Linux a short while back: 12
As a person who hangs around in repos but isn't a developer that sounds totally insane.
Why do you hang around there then? So you can write articles like this in an attempt to stir the shit? What is there to gain from that, for the fediverse?
I'd also like to know how you hang out there then, as I can't seem to find a person called Density hanging around? I might not be looking in the right place, of course
This early in a project, figuring out how to manage it effectively is a big part of the work, I think. There's no inevitability to either project failing or succeeding. I hope both projects do something cool, and if one fails I hope there are a few forks of it ready to carry on with the best parts of it.
Unrelated username commentary: Your leet/hex username had me wondering if it resolved as an IP address too. Turns out you belong to the US Department of Defense. Unsure if you knew that already.
For obvious reasons, I decided not to try to actually visit that IP.
I don’t think pitching #ActivityPub to existing social media makes sense. Adding federation to a non-federated social media service isn’t a net win.
You have to spend the time and money to implement it. Then you have to spend the time and money to maintain it. Most of the time, ActivityPub support is implemented as mastodon compatibility, not true AP support. This means having to constantly make sure you keep up with masto changes and constantly fielding issues with other implementations because you didn’t fully implement AP.
And after implementation, you don’t just gain access to a ton of new users, you have to take on the burden of moderating all of it (which is a persistent ant recurring time and money cost). And since the #fediverse has a ton of opinions on moderation, you’re always pissing somebody off.
And after all that, what you’ve enabled is an easy way for your users to recreate their social graph without your service. The idea of an interconnected social web is cool, and hopefully it’ll be the futrue, but it doesn’t make sense for profit-driven businesses.
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