this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Threads being in the Fediverse is a plus for me, not a negative. It means I could follow regular people and friends who would never in a million years join places like Mastodon or Lemmy while I still get the benefits of being on those platforms, all while being shielded from Meta’s ads and data harvesting. The only issue is I don’t actually believe Zuck will go through with it. They’ll either never federate or severely limit it if they do.
Mastodon themselves have put out a post outlining how this will affect them (it won’t) and how EEE is not a threat. If Meta does eventually opt out of ActivityPub then cool. It’s not like that’s why Mastodon users were there in the first place.
Embrace, extend and destroy is a known, well established, concept. Microsoft was quite open about how this is to be done.
It has already happened to established decentralised networks. See here!
Maybe it won't happen to Mastodon, maybe they have the masterminds who can counter it. But it is imo pretty clear that this is what Meta plans to do.
Read their privacy policy. They already admitted they will scrape info from 3rd party users/communities which interact with their users.
This is not a good thing.
They can scrape info already. Anyone can set up their own private instance, federate with others, and scrape info from there, and I'd be shocked if Meta wasn't already doing that. Besides the threads app collecting more data from the people that use the app, they can only collect data that is easily accessible from everyone else regardless of whether threads is federated or not
I get why people don’t want anything from Meta around stuff they use. They’re obviously awful. I just don’t think that even 5% of Fediverse users are going to ditch for Threads if Meta defederates. They were here before Meta and I can promise you not a single person on earth is signing up for Mastodon because it will federate with Threads only to have the rug pulled out from under them. This is a small niche community and that will not change with or without Meta. The people that Meta could siphon with EEE are already in their ecosystem.
I don't really see an argument for "extinguish" on that article. It looks like just "embrace, expand, unembrace." I can think of a few reasons how meta could degrade the quality of the metaverse, but the example of xmpp doesn't quite smell right - activitupub is mature (even if I disagree with lot of the core specs), and the fediverse is much more about "eventual consistency" instead of real-time chats where both side have to be online at the same time.
I don't really see an argument where Google drew people away from xmpp - the author themself said that nobody cared about the few xmpp users, so it's not like Google was drawing long-time xmpp users away.
I'd love to hear other opinions on that article.
I swear some of y'all just get off on doomsaying.
Do you think Facebook wants to get involved because they're excited about making the fediverse a better place?
No, they want to train AI models. They don't give a shit about taking over ActivityPub.
Why would they need threads to train AI models?
They don't need to take it over if they have enough unwitting users / communities / instances associating with their content & users, perhaps. Maybe they don't care about a smaller competitor if they can just scrape all the data anyway.
Number 3 will be difficult since most of the users moving are moving to get away from Meta. I find it hard to believe they'd just jump back into that ecosystem.
A lot of people aren't really ideologically opposed to Meta, they're just on Mastodon since it's there's less friction to use it than Twitter (see rise of Bluesky). Threads will "fix" a lot of issues people have with Mastodon (CW, no algorithm, inability to advertise, instances moving/going under) and they'll move without thinking anything of it since they can still access all of their Mastodon content
Of course the move back isn't going to be as easy, I doubt Meta is going to implement robust account migration, and then the easier choice is to stay on Threads. This is also ignoring the ~~incompatibilities~~ improvements to ActivityPub that Meta will introduce later on in Meta's lifespan, which will be poorly documented and rapidly changing if they open it up at all
Even if many Mastodon users don't switch immediately, this is enough to hamper the long term growth/health of the platform
Omg please get yourself educated. Really scary to know people like you exist.
The post has been put out by the people that made Mastodon. Why should anyone trust you over them when you provide 0 arguments against them.
Embrace Extend Extinguish was always a Microsoft strategy and one they have been forced to abandon over the years. Their attitude changed towards open source because it doesn't work! I think you might be the one who is lacking in knowledge or "education" here.
Open source doesnt work? Would love to see a source on that one alone. Almost sounds like you have an agenda to sell.
I think you misinterpreted what they said. They meant "Their attitude changed towards open source because [Embrace, Extend, Extinguish] doesn't work"
That's exactly what I meant! Did I fail to write it clearly or is their reading comprehension no good?
I had to read it twice because I misinterpreted it the same way.
That "it" could be interpreted either as 'open source' or 'EEE' from the previous sentence.
The sentence itself is a little ambiguous but it's nothing major, it's easy enough to get the message from context
?
What's your question? Microsoft invented and then abandoned the EEE strategy because the strategy dosen't work! Open source never went away no matter what they did.