@andreagrandi damn, never thought of that

@andreagrandi Also threads is the closest thing that some.entities will ever get to having a presence. Like big musicians you may want to follow, down to local city news orgs.

Thats the kind of thing I kind of miss.

@andreagrandi That's fine and dandy until Meta does the inevitable and creates a walled garden of trusted communities and defederates from all else, no?

Meta has zero financial nor cultural motive to embrace the Fediverse as we understand it other than extinguish it. This is why they are linking your Threads account to Instagram and requiring that you delete Instagram in order to delete your Threads account. And they still are trying to sell us on the idea that their accounts are "portable?"

@andreagrandi meanwhile they start following me, all my data gets pulled to the Threads server and gets mined and sold.

@andreagrandi and that you can follow every other Fedi service from *one* account.

I think the next most visible thing will be seeing their friends (us) switching servers without penalty.

And topic focused servers too

@andreagrandi
Thanks for outing yourself. You're blocked

@andreagrandi
Growth is not a goal in itself.
Neither is convincing facebook users.

@andreagrandi The "metaverse" is full of bigots. Meta makes money from spreading misinformation. How have people forgotten this already? Why would we want that on Mastodon? What they'll do is build one huge instance and exterminate every other one.

@andreagrandi so many problems with this. Threads culture will swamp fedi culture and *that* is all we need to consider.

Ten million people (so far) cannot federate without an impact on fedi culture, which is the most important reason for being on Mastodon.

@andreagrandi It will also add to the feature pressure on Mastodon devs, which is all to the good.

@andreagrandi why does everything always have to grow

@andreagrandi @lisamelton And vice versa.

There will definitely be interesting people on Threads that I would want to follow from my cosy place on Mastodon, while certainly not moving there.

https://mastodon.social/@verbeeld/110667440303766178

@andreagrandi they have always lived under the freedom of being controlled by someone else. They're scared to take that first step into the light.

@andreagrandi I kind of doubt they'll ever federate. I think they're using it as a buzzword, but it runs counter to their business model. They're just exploiting open source technology to get off the ground easier, but I bet they'll drag their feet on actually connecting. They might even blame the controversy it stirred up on Mastodon and use that to claim they're protecting their users or something.

@andreagrandi the fediverse as it is now shows that social medias do not need to be profit-driven, privacy lacking, unsustainable industries. The current fediverse is literally an existential threat for these corporations. They will do anything they can to ensure they can profit as long as they can before we realise how they pollute and alienate society, politics, culture, and the way we think, feel, and experience ourselves intimately. They fear something better is created and it is our chance

@andreagrandi especially once the ads and brands start showing up. "Hey, there's no ads on Mastodon and you can use whatever apps you want!"

This is also an incredible opportunity to normalize ActivityPub for normies and have them see the potential when they start seeing posts from the fediverse.

Threads is a billboard and it is a HUGE missed opportunity and very naive if we just try to ignore it.

@andreagrandi it’s not a missed opportunity yet, what percentage of Mastodon users are actually going to be defederated?

@andreagrandi exact reason why I’m here. I read up articles about Threads and ended up here in Mastodon.

@andreagrandi Except that in order to do that you have to let Threads federate, so giving access to the users on your instance.

The main other issue with that idea is that most instagram/fb users know they're being spied on but just decided to not care in the name of convenience.

@andreagrandi Then would it be okay for the rest of the Fediverse to tell stock Mastodon users that we have text formatting and no arbitrary message length limits?

I mean, once you open that door, it's hard to close it. 🤔

@andreagrandi This place already exists, they can move here now.

@andreagrandi I think Meta will ultimately seek to divide and conquer the fediverse, then break it up and destroy it. We're fools to trust a monopoly promising to act in goid faith. They have none.

@andreagrandi
Given that all the Mastodon users who are setting up on Threads won't be able to stop talking about how great life is over here for people who are (they will imply) smart enough to deal with it, I wouldn't be surprised to see this siphon off enough Threads users that Zuck has to pull a Musk and prohibit those references.

@andreagrandi @vmstan It would be good if Threads users could read this in their feed. They can’t decide what’s in their feed though.

@andreagrandi the dark side of this: Facebook is sucking everyones public data into their ad black box like they did with their like buttons years ago. Without explicit consent, without a way to opt out which makes it legally very questionable at least.

@andreagrandi I wouldn't mind having the ability to use Mastodon to access Threads. Or Facebook. Or Instagram. The only thing I care about is not being bound to Meta's Rules of Behavior, which are arbitrary, capricious and tend to favor extreme right-wingers. I remember Facebook was still advertising tac gear and body armor to any school shooter who might happen to have been interested in them, as recently as two years ago...

@andreagrandi This is a valid argument, but it ignores that a federated Threads will fail expected moderation standards within a millisecond of federating, and by that time it will be a hundred times the size of the Fediverse.

Moderators of any instances daft enough to not have blocked them, will either be swamped or give up and join the don't bother moderating threadiverse.

If I wanted to be on Facebook I would.

@andreagrandi I think having the more mainstream instagram app involved in the Fediverse is also growth, it brings more people into this space and reduces (my need at least) need for twitter

@andreagrandi sure but why would the threads algorithm show this posts to it's users?

@andreagrandi we've been telling them this the whole time they've been on the #birdsite, #Facebook, and #Instagram. If they hadn't gotten the message prior to the launch of #Threads, it's on them. No one on any of those platforms can claim "oh, I didn't know"

@andreagrandi
The naïveté (or hubris) is interesting, if nothing else: "How will this enormous entity with unlimited resources possibly negatively affect our little community run by volunteers?"

@andreagrandi I’d share your optimism if it weren’t for Meta’s track record of ruining everything they touch because it’s their core mission.

@andreagrandi Thank you! I think this should be used as an opportunity.

Threads is going to have some advantages, no doubt, but open source groups will be able to still survive, and I hope thrive.

I continue to hope this will do nothing but bring more people into a larger Fediverse where accounts and social graphs can be easily moved.

@andreagrandi YOU would - 99% of the users there won't...

@andreagrandi @lisamelton Spot on.

@andreagrandi My suspicion is federation will never happen on the Threads side (they’ve reached 30 million users, so they don’t need to try to poach the 13 million on Mastodon). Past that, I suspect Threads, due to its connection to Instagram, just withers and dies (I give it five years, tops). From what I’ve read, Threads doesn’t bring any additional value to Instagram as a product or a service, so why use Threads when you can just use Insta? Maybe I’ll be wrong. We’ll see.

@andreagrandi
There's a saying about letting the camel put their head in the tent ...

@andreagrandi It's also not like defederating from Threads will stop them from ingesting the feed from Activity Pub. They can do that regardless of what anyone else does.

Now, if Threads has shitty moderation or lets Nazis, Racist, Homophobic, Transphobic, etc content on there (like I assume it will) then that's a good reason to defederate.

@andreagrandi thats a really optimisitic way to look at it... The first thing, Meta will do is convincing all users about how unsafe it is is to use "inofficial" servers, that there can happen a lot of technical issues, etc.

@andreagrandi@mastodon.social

I've come to learn that there are many who prefer to have the "trends" fed to them. Looking for content exerts more effort than they desire to allocate to a social media experience.

I certainly don't advocate that. I'm much happier here, tailoring my feed as I wish. But have seen many friends leave here because they desire the rush from having info served to them on BlueSky and now Threads. 🤷‍♂️

@andreagrandi They only care about convenience. I'm guessing they have a nifty app. That they want to data mine so much info should be enough to scare people off.

@andreagrandi I largely agree, but trying to get people to jump ship from Facebook for a safer and and cleaner social media platform is like trying to convince domestic abuse victims to leave before they’re ready or able to.

Showing them a better future won’t really break down the barriers set up to prevent outflow, Threads has a gun to the head of your Instagram, that’s quite coercive for even dipping your toes in.