Mastodon communities are already coordinating trying to fully defederate threads. This is definitely going to be interesting to watch as a big whale jumps into the fediverse with the intent to profit
That's why nobody takes the 'fediverse' seriously.
Threads is not the first server being blocked because moderator x don't like the owner of that server. Imagine if signing up for a @gmail.com email meant that you can't send or receive emails from @outlook.com addresses because the owner is mad at Microsoft.
They could have taken this as a big opportunity to make ActivityPub mainstream but nah, let's keep gatekeeping our bubbles. They're the only losing.
folks are quite happy in the fediverse so I dont really see the "losing" here. if "losing" means not having to welcome an army of trolls taunting them as "loser gatekeepers" then lose away
The only way to stay away from trolls is running an instance at localhost without any networking. I thought social applications were meant to connect people.
Instagram is a more oriented community. I do not care about Facebook, but on IG I have a lot of likewise minded people. Making this into a more sprawling community platform makes sense.
And your example isn't even accurate to what is happening.
Imagine signing up for @gmail.com meant you can't send to anyone at @outlook.com because like 2 users on Outlook said something "kind of rude" if you take it out of context and get over sensetive about EVERYTHING.
Like, I am all for inclusion, and fuck rude people etc, but you can see an e tire instance blocked because one user was a jackass to one tiny server admin who stuck the offending instance on some unmoderated blacklist website with something vague like "hate speech".
>They could have taken this as a big opportunity to make ActivityPub mainstream but nah, let's keep gatekeeping our bubbles. They're the only losing.
Just curious, what do you mean by "mainstream?" Did you really mean widespread adoption of ActivityPub (AP) or did you mean "one additional instance of an AP instance that has millions of users?"
Meta getting into the Fediverse doesn't do anything to make AP "mainstream," rather it exposes the existing users of the Fediverse to a single instance that has the users that many of those in the Fediverse setup/joined instances to get away from.
What's more, Meta's business model (hyping conflict and clickbait to drive engagement and ad revenue) is antithetical to many in the fediverse.
As such, it's not surprising that many admins don't want anything to do with them, as they've shown themselves to be bad actors on their own platform. And that's the main reason admins ban instances -- because they're (at least from the admin's point of view) bad actors.
It's almost enough to get me to federate my AP instances just so I can ban/block Meta. But I don't even want to federate with extant AP instances, so I won't bother.
I've seen some talk on my feed about servers potentially defederating mastodon.social if they don't defederate with Facebook. And that's "official" server hosted by the project and probably the biggest server. Definitely would make it confusing for those users who just want it to work when they can't interact with users on other servers.
The wider fediverse continues to demonstrate why most people prefer to stick to centralized social media. If I wanted to deal with moral busybodies who feel like they have to respond to everything, I'd just tune back into the political side of Reddit and Twitter.
With the fediverse, the most likable servers I've interacted with all just let people do whatever they want as long as it isn't illegal and doesn't overload the server. It's great not having to see the moderators and admins freaking out over yet another perceived slight against their ideology every other day.
That can work for those of us who don't mind figuring all that stuff out, I too went through a few accounts to understand how everything worked before finally setting up my own server, but most people just want something they can rely on being relatively out of the way rather than switching accounts whenever they don't agree with moderation decisions.
Thus my emphasis on why most people would rather just deal with centralized social media than the fediverse. That way there isn't any additional research to do, you just make an account and tolerate the terrible moderation. No additional steps about worrying about if the specific server you're on is agreeable, no need to worry about self-hosting.
Eg none of my friends were interested in doing all that research, so the only way to get them into the fediverse was on my server. Now that they're there, they're able to use it however they want and just block for themselves whatever they personally don't want to see.
Of course servers have the option to do whatever they want, which is great, but that doesn't mean they can't be criticized.
> Of course servers have the option to do whatever they want, which is great, but that doesn't mean they can't be criticized.
It's just that to a lot of us, that isn't a thing that makes much sense to be criticized. Like complaining that there's no lovely exhaust smell from an electric car.
To a lot of us it not being a massive central server that is instantly viable for everyone on the planet is the good thing.
Many of us don't want everyone on the Fedi. We want people interested in the premise of what the Fedi gives. Which inherently is tied to being okay with uninterested people not joining.
I've been on Mastodon for ~8 months (or w/e). Back in November, all the people claiming it was just a fad, that it would never exceed Twitter, were doom saying all through Jan/etc when the flood didn't cripple Mastodon. Yet there i and everyone i knew on it was, just using it.
The only interesting/concerning thing here is just having Facebook on ActivityPub.
Some will choose to federate with it (if it's an option), some won't. Just as they do with other instances. That's the beauty of it. Fragmentation is not a bug, it's a feature.
(b) The mechanics of XMPP vs ActivityPub (ie point to point messages vs social media stuff) are very different.
(c) It's Facebook, and a lot of people really, really, _really_ don't trust Facebook, particularly on the privacy side. I think if this was, say, Tumblr/Automattic, or even Google bringing Buzz back from the dead, the knee-jerk reaction would be lesser, even if the potential _problems_ would be similar; Facebook just has a horribly compromised reputation (note that they _renamed_ themselves, which is not generally what you do when you have a well-regarded brand).
I'm not saying the extra level of concern RE Facebook is _rational_, in this instance, just that it's _there_, and that it shouldn't be surprising it's there, based on Facebook's prior record.
First off, "they" is a diverse group of people with different opinions on all three of these topics. Secondly, assuming you're talking about RSS, what people wanted from Google wasn't federation but syndication. Google broke the deal and moved to their own solution, acting like they were never a part of RSS in the first place. They later admit they were wrong and added RSS functionality back. Third, people less want Apple to open messages and more want them to make a version of it that doesn't rely on Apple as a single point of failure. It makes iMessage functionally incomplete as an SMS successor.
And this? People will do whatever they want, across thousands of instances, and eventually people will decide whether they were right or not. The fact that these users even have the freedom to reject Meta outright is worth celebrating.
My prediction is that this will be even less effective than the reddit blackout protests at actually accomplishing anything. It'll just make people feel like they're sticking it to the man without actually doing anything.
Well, depending on how well-moderated the Facebook thing turns out to be (I would not be particularly optimistic, though you never know) you avoid subjecting your users to all sorts of unpleasantness.
I'm keeping an open mind, for now (though I'm pessimistic, because, well, it's Facebook, and Facebook are _bad_ at this), but I may end up moving instance over this (either direction; maybe threads is a net benefit but my instance defederates, maybe it's bloody awful but my instance doesn't).
I actually see this as an upside of the federated approach; I get to choose whether I want exposure to this.
Threads is not the first server being blocked because moderator x don't like the owner of that server. Imagine if signing up for a @gmail.com email meant that you can't send or receive emails from @outlook.com addresses because the owner is mad at Microsoft.
They could have taken this as a big opportunity to make ActivityPub mainstream but nah, let's keep gatekeeping our bubbles. They're the only losing.