Threads’ roadmap for integrations with the fediverse, aka the network of decentralized apps that includes Twitter/X rival Mastodon and others, has been revealed. A new blog post by Tom Coates, the co-founder of an older decentralized app called Planetary, details the events of a December meeting at Meta’s offices where the Threads team had reached out to members of the fediverse community to get feedback about the Instagram-led project to take on X with a decentralized app that will eventually interoperate with others in the fediverse by way of the ActivityPub protocol.
By that logic though, what does lemmy.ml do for the fediverse? Or mas.to? Or any specific instance? Nothing, they’re one cog in a pool of federated instances.
And make no mistake, either the fediverse stays so tiny companies ignore it other than what Meta is doing now (to pre-empty EU legislation so they can point at supporting open interoperable formats), or we have to accept commercial enterprises will flood the fedi-space anyways if it takes off.
I agree, the entrance of large corporations into the fediverse is nearly inevitable and I am ok with that. What matters is how and when they do it and how that changes the politics, identity and community of the fediverse. WE have the cards because as you say corporate social networks that basically have monopolies are going to eventually be forced by regulation (unless we are on even shittier timeline than I thought) to join the fediverse or do something similar.
Think about the difference though between welcoming in meta to the fediverse like they are some cool popular kid that decided to join our lame party and now everyone wants to come to the party vs rejecting meta because we know their offer isn’t genuine and making them come back later to the fediverse in a much more precarious situation where they HAVE to work something out with us or they face geometrically growing legal and populist hostility that threatens the existence of their company?
Which situation is more likely to result in a relationship more advantageous to normal people and communities on the fediverse? Which one puts more power in the hands of small communities and regular people on the fediverse? Which one is less likely to result in meta hijacking the public’s perception of the fediverse and subverting the reasons that the original denizens of the fediverse came here for?
I’m not okay with it.
I’m all for cutting federation with any instance that allows them in to their space.
lemmy.ml is the flagship instance. that’s like asking what mastodon.social does for the fediverse.
Yeah what do they? Just their size? So if Threads brings in huge amounts of federation users that’d automatically make them relevant and useful to have around? Size matters, especially when it comes to your federated instance?
it’s not their size. they are literally the developers.
Meta could take over the fediverse pretty easily once they’ve been here for a while.
Yes, Threads will be technically just an instance of a federated network with thousands of instances. But Threads is so fucking big in comparison that most posts will come from there. And at that point, they can impose their algorithms and recommendations on us.
this is a joke, right? lemmy instances which i participate in have done a far better job of moderation and protecting minorities than any experience i have had on a meta product. i cant begin to tell you how many times ive reported content on meta services that is a blatant call to violence, only to have it come back “no violations found.” and im far from the only one
safety. safety is what lemmy.ml/lemmy.blahaj.zone/mas.to bring to the fediverse. and where one instance fails, another is available to pick up slack. i refuse to subscribe to the notion that playing gullible for an institution which profits off the attention span of children is the only way for me to socialize online. you shouldn’t either. we all need to get over ourselves with this “must take off” language.