Ooh, Threads? Yeah - Threads is great. Of course, you’re referring to the award-winning anti-war film about nuclear war, right? Right??
Heard some people at work talking about it with such excitement and zeal. It really does baffle me how little people care about privacy as long as they get their fix of social media entertainment. It’s a little depressing, and I can only hope that Threads don’t ruin the Fediverse in the future.
I think its as simple as people as a group tend to have short memory. Right now Musk = bad, so they run to Zucc despite knowing he’s just as bad maybe worse. They want to feel like they’re doing something. Seriously if you’re evil all you gotta do is stay quiet for long enough to come back into the spotlight.
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How many of those accounts are bots?
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How many of the humans will still be posting in 30 days?
Well, Threads has an estimated 30+ million users already. Threads will easily have more daily active users than the entirety of the Fediverse if even just 1% stick around.
Threads would have 150% the number of users in that case, and that’s assuming the app stops growing.
I’ve gotten a good amount of pushback (well reasoned, but pushback nonetheless) about my position on how we need to think of where we fit into all of this. But realistically we are tiny. ActivityPub—if it ever comes to Threads—can be easily bastardized and made proprietary by Meta unilaterally.
We’ve seen it more times than we can even remember. Microsoft did it with IE, Google is doing it with Chrome and RCS (for those who haven’t seen my other comments: no, Android RCS is not an open standard. Google closed it with proprietary layers which is why no other messaging apps are allowed to access Google’s RCS save for a few like Samsung), and even Mastodon.
That’s right: Mastodon has not adapted ActivityPub fully to standard and instead opts to go it’s own way. And now other projects are hiving off and—you guessed it—implemented Mastodon’s approach rather than the official ActivityPub standard.
At least according to ActivityPub co-creator Evan Prodromou (on the Changelog podcast episode “Into the Fediverse” on 2023-02-24 around the 10 minute mark). He isn’t putting down Mastodon at all; but it stands to show just how easily a single big player can hijack things. We got lucky that Mastodon didn’t radically pivot and integrate hostile practices.
But Meta will. We all know this. This is what capitalists do. They gain nothing by allowing competition, even if minor.
Edit: in case I wasn’t clear, I’m not attacking Mastodon. I love Mastodon. I don’t love the NDA that the creator signed with Meta. I don’t like his stances regarding Meta. I understand things do need to deviate at points, as is the nature of all software. I’m a software engineer myself (albeit not for anything related to ActivityPub or social media). It is more an example of how quickly things can go sideways with just one big player willing it into existence.
But realistically we are tiny.
Exactly - too small to be of any bother.
Agreed, to an extent. But falling into the siren song of “the goal is federation no matter what” will inevitably lead us down the road traveled many times before. The problem comes when Meta starts tweaking and exploiting. If our implementations change to maintain adequate federation with Meta—well, it is only a matter of time at that point.
I again point to RCS. That was tiny. Google still bothered, and now the only real implementation is their own because anyone with a say simply went along with it (whether directly, or via passivity).
On the other hand, we are significant enough to warrant pandering and supposed adoption. There’s no reason for Threads to use (eventually) ActivityPub.
Some have theorized that Meta glommed onto it in order to skirt EU regulations regarding gatekeepers. That could be another angle.
But I’m truly worried that, as decentralized communities and ultimately disorganized projects, one big player will swing through and take it all away in one way or another. It’s happened before.
the goal is federation no matter what
I don’t think anyone is saying that should be the case. However, neither do I think we should be saying “no federation, no matter what”. Meta is purely self-interested, of course, but I don’t think we have any idea what it’s intentions are with regard to ActivityPub
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I mean… It’s mostly Instagram users. It’s not like they had much more to lose from it.
I’m more interested in seeing the daily users in like a month or so. Tons of folks I know, including myself, are checking it out just bc it’s brand new. Personally, I’ve seen enough and it’s pretty garbo, and I’m guessing a lot of people will do the same.
Folks will drop it because it’s cringe before they drop it for anything privacy related.
Instagram users with FOMO syndrome.
I’m more interested in seeing the daily users in like a month or so. Tons of folks I know, including myself, are checking it out just bc it’s brand new. Personally, I’ve seen enough and it’s pretty garbo, and I’m guessing a lot of people will do the same.
Folks will drop it because it’s cringe before they drop it for anything privacy related.
Data collected by Threads can include users’ sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, biometric data, trade union membership, pregnancy status, politics, and religious beliefs. Threads can also collect data on users’ employment, as well as health and fitness. Beyond that, the app also can collect data monitoring users’ location and other web activity.
Geez meta, do you want the results of my colonoscopy too? (spoiler: they do)
“Health and financial data, precise location, search history, browsing history, and more are not needed for a user to be on the app and are instead used to create a more hyper-personalized and targeted experience on the app or shared with and sold to advertisers,” Schroeder told Ars.
Fuck targeted experiences, all my homies hate targeted experiences
Data collected by Threads can include users’ sexual orientation, race and ethnicity, biometric data, trade union membership, pregnancy status, politics, and religious beliefs. Threads can also collect data on users’ employment, as well as health and fitness. Beyond that, the app also can collect data monitoring users’ location and other web activity.
Geez meta, do you want the results of my colonoscopy too? (spoiler: they do)
“Health and financial data, precise location, search history, browsing history, and more are not needed for a user to be on the app and are instead used to create a more hyper-personalized and targeted experience on the app or shared with and sold to advertisers,” Schroeder told Ars.
Fuck targeted experiences, all my homies hate targeted experiences
Sexuality and union membership? FUCK THAT.
The question here is: how many users should we expect Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, with all the cash hoard of Meta behind it, to be able to get together for a new app?
30 mil sounds like peanuts in that context. Aren’t there like a billion people on Meta’s properties?
It is peanuts to Meta but not to others like Masterdon and the Fediverse. It’s also enough of a message to the likes of Twitter to be seen as a threat.
It goes to show how monopolized the social converse is these days online.
I know that Meta is awful for privacy, but being on Lemmy/Mastodon is not exactly private either. Everything you do on here is as public to Meta as Threads is. They can easily pull any data and metrics they’d like from the fediverse, even if instances defederate from them. There are plenty of other reasons to not like Threads but picking Mastodon over Threads because of privacy isn’t exactly changing that situation.
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There’s a difference between the Fediverse exposing and federating your posts and likes, and Facebook’s aggressive harvesting of engagement data, device metrics, location, etc. With federation, they can only get a fraction of a fraction of the data they usually get.
If you’re already accepting of Facebook, design flaws, and privacy concerns aren’t going to sway you from “The new thing”.
Not really that crazy since Instagram has over 2 billion active users month. 30 million is less than 2% of that.
Uhg. Cannibalizing the bird app for something equally obnoxious. These corporations are playing us for Suckers …
Design flaws compared to what? The flaming piece of shit that is Twitter right now?
I get that it isn’t Mastodon, but it is amazing what you can do when you can mobilize an existing app to gain users for another one.
