I don’t understand what Meta will gain from participating in the fediverse? Their ultimate goal is to make money of Threads and I just don’t see how encouraging an open federation will help them do it? Even 3Eing the fediverse will not do them much good as they already have sooo much traffic already that killing the fediverse will not make a serious change in their figures. But OTOH it does seem like Threads is net positive for the fediverse ATM. Even if all current denizens of the fediverse will block Threads, there is a large group of people that are exposed to the concept of “fediverse” for the fist time and some of them will want to learn more. This is a good thing. Anyway, I don’t know why they are doing it, but I’m cautiously glad they did it. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
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I think they’re trying to get people off Fedi and into Threads.
Yeah that’s a possibility. They could do something like “ohh too bad Killer Feature X is looking so badly on Mastodon. On Threads it will look so much better”. Essentially using fedi as a crappy demo for Threads. That sounds like a typical business plan to me.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. It’s the old Microsoft playbook that Google is trying to pull with Chrome.
I don’t know, aren’t most of the citizens of the fediverse here because we are abandoning the large, profit-driven social media companies? It seems like it’s more of an invasion than persuasion - they want access to what we have, and since the AP is open, they can get access to it (mostly Mastodon, but also the content we have on the wider fediverse as well).
My opinion is it’s just the data, Meta is all about collecting data. Being part of the fediverse means they potentially get access to a bunch of data through scraping and user interactions.
For example someone might not follow a gardening account on instagram/Facebook but they might join a gardening community. That’s valuable data.
They can also boast about the new technology. Maybe they hope it will revive the meta verse lol
That’s a very good point. There’s always an agenda when it comes to these massive companies. The more data they have, the more predictions they can make, and the more accurate they’ll be. Understanding how people move through these communities is massive for Meta. The more you understand something, the better you know how to exploit it.
I’ll summarize what the CEO of Instagram said in an interview on the Hardfork podcast this morning. Lots of hot takes here based on everyone’s rightful skepticism of Meta, but I think it’s worth understanding what their stated plan is.
First, the CEO said he thinks federation is the future, that social media in general is going to be increasingly moving that way in the next 5 years. This gives them a chance to take a big early swing in the space and get some learning in. Remeber, as much as a lot of fediverse people are worried about Threads joining, Threads is also worried about all of you who are already on the Fediverse. Part of what they are selling is a sane and we’ll moderated social platform that regular people can use, and federating is a challenge to their moderation. They are trying to work out how they can moderate content coming into the Threads server and shown to those users without having to defederate entire servers.
Second, and similar to number one, they expect that content creators, influencers, etc will come to expect account/follower portability as decentralization of social media becomes more widespread. This one is huge, and it’s one of their main selling points. They are telling celebrities that hey you can join Threads and it will be safe and sane, but if five years down the line you hate it, you can just pack up your account and move to another platform and keep all your followers. This is a really big deal, celebrities, influencers, journalists, etc spend years building followings and the main thing holding a lot back from jumping off Twitter for example is that when they go to a new platform they start with zero followers. Joining a platform where you are assured that you can jump ship without having to start at zero everytime is a huuuge selling point, and the reason they’ve been able to get celebrities on as early adopters.
Finally, the CEO said ads will probably come some day, but they are not focused on monetization at all right now, but just building a sustainable platform that is fun to use. They expect a lot of initial interest, and then for a bunch of users to get bored and leave, and then to work on slow growth overtime.
That’s straight from the horse’s mouth (via my memory). Was he being perfectly honest, probably not. For example, he said they made the decision to push Threads out now before it was fully EU complaint because EU compliance would take months and he was afraid they could miss their window of opportunity. He wouldn’t explicitly say Twitter has gone to shit and their going after that market, but that’s pretty clearly what he was alluding to. Also, keep in mind as a corporate representative all his statements can get the company in trouble for misleading shareholders (see Musks “going private at 420 a share” tweet for example), so he’s not able to outright lie about the company’s plans. So I’d take this all with a grain of salt, but I wouldn’t run immediately to conspiracy theories.
ads will probably come some day, but they are not focused on monetization at all right now
most sites do not start out shittified, they become ENshittified.
That is fair. I mostly just think its interesting that he was fairly upfront about it. Meta is a for profit business, so its not unexpected. I do think it will be interesting though because they seem pretty committed to account portability, and if they stick with that then that puts some pressure on them to maintain a good user experience. Even all the talk about embrace, extend, extinguish, all starts with the assumption that Threads will be so big it will make changes and force other instances to either comply or get defederated and the assumption is that users would flock to Threads from Mastadon rather than the other way around. Personally, I expect Meta’s move here is going to increase interest in Activitypub and more projects are going to be launched on it, both from startups and established big tech. I think its equally plausible that the better analogy is AOL opening up to the world wide web and HTML and getting swallowed in the process. There is a lot of fear about Threads, but I’m not convinced this is a doomsday scenario for the fediverse, I’m personally cautiously optimistic.
They are probably also hoping that it will give them the necessary good will with EU competition regulators that are already trying to break Meta’s market dominance on social media and communication.
By being the first major social network to adopt activityhub, it means they have an advantage when/if activityhub takes off.
Squash the fediverse before it reaches critical mass.
That’s not how the fediverse works though. Google and Facebook were the two biggest sites online, but even then they still couldn’t “squash” the world wide web, the most successful federated service.
They’re trying to “embrace, extend, extinguish.” Federated social media is an existential threat to them, so they’re trying to absorb it before it has the chance to gain momentum.
I don’t know what their intentions are in full, but they certainly won’t be good from our perspective. We came here to free ourselves from corporate shackles, not bind ourselves back up in them.
Meta’s biggest business has been the manipulation of public opinion for years now. Their entry in the Fediverse is just their latest attempt at keep doing it. Privacy invasion and targeted ads are just tools that enable it for the former, and finance it for the later.
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Honestly I somewhat agree with this. I get the fear about Meta hurting the Fediverse by federating with it and then acting maliciously (XMPP), but I actually think it’s an “I’m not trapped in here with you…” type of situation. I would point to the example of AOL giving its users access to Usenet / the WWW – their hand was forced a little bit if they wanted to stay relevant, but I actually could see an argument that the community network was so compelling, and so outside the control of AOL if someone else wanted to compete with them on it, that that increased awareness of the world outside AOL was just one more factor that contributed to their downfall. They went from being their own wildly successful content provider to a captive audience, to being a bargain-basement ISP no different than thousands of others, to being irrelevant.
IDK what I would do if I were Meta, sitting on this aging flagship platform and trying to stay relevant with a clear and compelling exit door available for my users. Also, clearly I don’t have a multi-billion dollar company to argue for my own qualifications, but that said, I think what I would do in that situation is:
- Put serious effort and attention into making FB / Instagram / Whatsapp / etc a useful and rewarding platform for people to interact with each other
- Try to come up with genuinely compelling functionality and apps that are a reason for people to be on their platforms instead of somewhere else
What I wouldn’t do is:
- Change my name to Meta and hope no one ties “Meta” to “Facebook” mentally when they’re writing off Facebook as a obsolete and boomer-ized platform
- Do anything to help build awareness of the Fediverse in my user base
- Keep my actual platform 90% the same (notably the central place advertising has in dictating operations)
Edit: I am wrong (at least as far as the AOL parts). I was confusing AOL with some of the other walled-garden networks that granted their users web access as the web took off, but it was a web provider from the very beginning in addition to having its own little AOL services. Usenet access came later, but even that was pretty early in their history, well before their downfall. My analysis sounds compelling maybe but I think it’s 100% wrong now that I’ve looked a little more into AOL’s history. I looks to me now like they mostly got destroyed by broadband replacing dialup and being unable to pivot away from their dialup-centric roots.
Free eyeballs are free eyeballs.
I think they’re making a move on Twitter. They smell blood in the water, Twitter’s weak, not worth buying, but worth supplanting. Here’s the Fedverse with a ready-made platform, so no use re-inventing the wheel. They don’t care that it’s the Fedverse. They just want the interface, to build a replacement.
If Reddit keeps being stupid they can expect the same treatment.
But truly, I know nothing and speculate wildly on most subjects. And I’m new here and understand nothing about the Fedverse.
