Honestly this is just pure paranoia because nobody has given a solid reason as to why they would give a single shit about the few hundred thousand users here. Your only argument is “well it exists, so maaaybe they’ll use it but better” which has no basis. As for losing control of your data, you have no control of your data here. It’s public information. Any person, corporation, computer literate cat, etc can already scrape everything you post here. Don’t mistake anonymity for data privacy.

Like I said, block em, defederate, whatever measures you want to take are an option, but for the love of god let’s just stop parroting nonsense at eachother because it sounds clever. I came here to get away from reddit culture.

My take was that most people 1) don’t want Meta/Facebook spam - low effort memes, propaganda, etc. and 2) don’t want their content to be used by Meta. The former seems pretty easy - just defederate and you don’t see any of their crap. The second is sort of a gray area… Whether or not you are diametrically opposed to Meta/Facebook or not, once you post your content to a public site, it’s available. I haven’t been here long, but defederation seems to work both ways, so FB would have to scrape content from known instances to get that content unless I’m mistaken.

FB could smoke any instance by DDOSing scrapes whether intended or otherwise, but once you post your data on a public forum, Meta could theoretically use it.

But to your comment - I don’t see what starting a new instance would do for anyone for #2. Any new instance is discoverable by nature, so FB can come knocking at any time for content whether you defederate or not.

Right now it’s only supported for Instagram accounts right? So slap in ActivityPub and you’ve got an already working way to extend your app. It’s easy, it’s fast development, and it’s cheap. It makes tons of sense.

Also, Meta and the rest of FAANG are a company of a bunch of nerds with a history of open sourcing software. This isn’t some crazy play, this is completely normal for them.

So when’s extinguish come in? XMPP still exists, google dropping support didn’t kill XMPP, it just doesn’t work with their app anymore. They weren’t trying to kill XMPP, they were just going what Google does and dropping projects as soon as they aren’t profitable.

Easy integration outside Instagram. They’re rushing to market to head off Twitter and the app only works for Instagram users, way easier to extend that by integrating open source software than rebuilding their own proprietary software from scratch. They can win without destroying it.

I’m not going to say you are wrong, but I have yet to meet a single fucking person that actually cares about bubble colors.

I hear this parroted so often, but never see it myself. Didn’t see it when all I had used was Android devices, didn’t see it when I tried an iPhone and got involved in their own communities.

Wait, so Apple intentionally made iOS messages highly incompatible with Android users?

Google dropping support for XMPP is what put it one foot in the grave. They abused the protocol to gain the lion’s share of users for Google Talk, and then cut off any resistance that remained. It exists still, technically, but when’s the last time you heard about or used it? I only know about it because EVE Online players used it for large group text communication before Discord became a thing.

XMPP still exists in the same way that critically endangered animals still exist: barely and by the adamant will of some dedicated few.

It happens in the extend part.

This is it right here.

If you need a real-world example look at the original web browsers:

NCSA Mosaic (the very first web browser) fully supported what would be later known as HTTP verison .9 . There was universal compatibility because there was only one browser supporting HTTP. Later Netscape Navigator would come on the scene and add functionality that was not supported in Mosaic (like the <blink> tag for example), but nothing hugely breaking page views between the two browsers.

Fast forward to Internet Explorer v3, v4 and v5 where MS would not only show all the pages that the prior browsers would, but they EXTENDED by letting HTML still work without following all the same standards. It was easier to write pages for IE than it was to the specification. Then EXTENDED again by MS added ActiveX to web sites meaning now ONLY MS IE could display these pages, and for a time that meant only Windows computers could. This is the Extinguish part.

The “Extend” step gets adopted because its attractive to users.

Here’s a non-computer analogy:

Lets say your current car get 25MPG. Now lets says that Shell come out with a gasoline that would let your same car go 40MPG with zero changes. Just buy Shell gas now at nearly the same price as anyone else’s and you get significantly more range. Most people would do it. Moreover, Shell buys Honda and starts manufacturing cars designed to work on that same new Shell gas could go 60mpg with even more power! So when you go to buy your next car 5 years later after using the gas, you don’t want to turn down 60MPG with more power. That Shell/Honda looks very attractive! All this time all the other gas stations have been going out of business because few people want to pay nearly the same amount for gasoline that only gets a fraction of the range. In the end, ONLY Shell gasoline is being sold, and nearly everyone drives a Shell/Honda to get the most benefit. This is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

It doesn’t seem at all plausible to me that meta threads will pull users away from mastodon/pleroma/misskey/etc. though. If they “extend” the federation protocol to the point they become incompatible with the rest of these implementations, they will just go away and we’re back to where we were before they started federating.

Right, and that’s exactly how IE/Edge is the one globally dominant browser it is today. Oh no, wait, that’s the very standards compliant Chrome

What kinds of extensions should the typical activitypub user be worried about? I don’t care if Meta adds payments or virtual avatars or whatever–if the core functionality of the Threads app is simple microblogging, it should be perfectly interoperable with that side of the fediverse.

The more likely effect IMO (if Meta holds to their word on enabling federation on their side) is that other large social media companies (e.g. reddit, twitter) will feel pressured to federate and that will make the fediverse better, not worse.

My account is on kbin.social but I’m working on getting kbin self hosted. When I do, I’ll absolutely be federating with Threads whether or not kbin.social does.

The outcome then would be that Meta’s instance would be defederated/defederate itself - how would that be different from now?

Most comprehensive article on this topic I’ve seen since this Meta shenanigan started. Thanks for the read

yep, your edit is correct - and is what the previous poster meant by public info

The point is simple, the moment you have the biggest chunk of the userbase, you have more weight in establishing praxis for standards & protocols. In fact, the protocol needs to catch up with you, rather than viceversa. Google did the same with Chrome, for example. Try to start a browser today, and with all the stuff that Google forced into standards and that your browser need to comply with, you will fail. Even just forcing a pace in changes to ActivityPub can mean that a number of tools that are developed by volunteers won’t be able to keep up.

Imagine Meta brings in 100m users. This is a fraction of their userbase, but it is 8x the whole fediverse. Imagine now that they make some change that doesn’t comply with ActivityPub, what do you do, break the tool that is used by the 90% of the users, or adapt? And what if they push changes to ActivityPub, so that everyone needs to catch up quickly: lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed, etc. How soon before some tools with less active development will die because non-compliant? (Similarly to how some browser break with some sites)

For what it’s worth, I agree with your reading, and nobody has described what I consider to be a plausible scenario for how exactly “embrace, extend, extinguish” would actually work here.

I don’t think Meta should be given the benefit of the doubt or anything and people may have differing opinions about the likely user base for Threads, but I don’t think this is any real concern to the fediverse in general.

@ninboy Sure, you’re not going to close that “analog hole,” but in a case like that, the audience is aware that the content isn’t from the site they’re on. Me- (and you- and everyone-)sourced content appearing on a Meta site as though it was Meta content would carry some things to have real concerns about.

Of course, this is all really new(ish), so it’s possible that a future internet audience will have a better awareness of how federation works, and bring that understanding with them while they browse. On the other hand, have you seen people?

Tangent: You tagged me in your original reply, which made me wonder why, and if I should do the same thing. Checking your username, I see you’re on from mastodon.social, and here I am via kbin.social. I think this is my first real interplatform conversation like that, and I think it’s really cool.

You make a good point.

Under the Castle Doctrine laws in my state, if Zuckerberg walked into my house without being invited then I could start blastin.

I’ll post the legalese mumbo jumbo on my door to keep him out, like he’s a vampire.

I bet your DNA profile is part of the “other data”. /s