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.
Honestly this is why the whole “Meta will kill the fediverse” thing people were saying never really convinced me. They just don’t seem to care, I mean it’s been a month and they still have no real plans to actually federate.
This is an incredible read on why Threads federating is bad news: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is the 1004th time I am seeing people mentioning this article.
I mentioned it 3 times in this last day since I read it! Maybe it is spreading.
I do it because I think it is the most important point on the fediverse. The fediverse is a tool of freedom, morals, ethics, for those that want to be connected, something that no commercial entity will offer. And it’s ok for it to not grow at all costs, or be the widespread available platform. It just needs to be present and faithful to itself.
I keep seeing this article posted to scare people, but Lemmy and Mastodon aren’t in the same situation as XMPP. XMPP had barely any users outside of Google Talks, with the overwhelming majority of interactions on XMPP being between Google Talks users. Google was tying their product to a public standard that they couldn’t develop however they wanted, all for compatibility with very few users. When they pulled out of using XMPP to develop their own platform, the sheer lack of users on XMPP outside of Google Talks became apparent. This will not be the case with Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon/ect. Mastodon has 10 million registered users, and Lemmy has hundreds of thousands. The majority of both service’s users are not about to switch over to sell their soul to the Zucc, so if Facebook federates for a while before defederating, Lemmy and Mastodon will have as large and robust communities as they have now, and the services will live on unlike with XMPP
Comes to mind that personally I had no commitment to Jabber or Pidgin, it was only a means to talk to people I wanted to talk, which I remained able to do after they were dropped. But Lemmy and Mastodon are communities, it takes more than tinkering with the protocol to kill it.
They would have to convince people who are here because they are already sick of Big Tech social media, that going back to Meta, of all places, is the right move. If they can do that, then it’s not a matter of EEE or whatever, it’s that we failed to maintain a compelling community.
I believe in this place more than that. Which is why I believe that if integration came to pass, it’s more likely that we would gain users, who would peek through the Meta windows and notice that we are having a better experience.
Our content will be drowned by the amount of content a mainstream Meta can output.
And if you would like for users to notice the free fediverse among that content, they would need to ignore all Meta/commercial communities. That’s not practical. It also amounts to defederating with Meta, which is practical, and what is suggested anyways. If people are curious about the free fediverse they will hear about it and find it.
Only if people consistently choose to subscribe to Meta creators and communities over the ones on the Fediverse. It’s not like people here will be auto subscribed to whatever infiniscroll algorithmic slop Meta is serving. Meta can’t forcibly implement that into other instances.
If Meta means to use the ActivityPub as a selling point, they need to show at least some of it to their users. But if they give up entirely, then there’s no need to worry about defederating anyway.
That said I’m not naive and I expect that Meta will try to play dirty, but it seems to me like the extent of what they can do is pretty limited by the decentralized structure of the Fediverse. They can’t just take other instances over, unless they downright buy the admins, and that’s a whole separate matter than federation. If they do, still, it’s trivial for users to jump into another instance away from Zuck’s scaly hands.
But even then, if it’s so easy to attract people away from the Fediverse, then it means that there is something it is lacking, and that’s not going to be solved by being reclusive and trying to stay beneath notice.
I think the u/Kes put it really well. People on fediverse platforms are already staunchly opposed to big tech so they have no reason to leave for platform made by Meta of all people.
It always felt like a backup plan. Or maybe that plan was before they remembered they had 2 billion users on Instagram they could bootstrap off.