Threads will support ActivityPub. They already have UI elements in place for it in the app (like showing your home server domain on your profile), so there's no reason to believe that isn't their intention. The problem, if any, will be on the other end. Plenty of Mastodon/Fediverse servers have already stated their intention of blocking Meta's access to their networks, so even in the best case the end result will be a fragmented mess.
Not to mention they’ve already held meetings with Fediverse instance admins under NDA about something a while ago [1]. So not only is it their stated plan, they’ve clearly contributed resources to research aswell and still announced the plan after these meetings took place.
Likely certain instances have said they’ll federate with it in the meetings, and for other instances that block them Meta will say “Well your admins are the ones who blocked us! Take your problems up with them” to any users that wish to interact with Threads on their instance.
Sure, but what new insight has knollslaw.substack.com brought to this topic other than "Companies make big launch promises all the time that don’t ever pan out"?
So a post with no real substance on why it’ll never happen other than “companies lie” yet Mera is out advertising the fact multiple places they will be mastodon compatible including messaging to influencers that their data and followers will be portable. This is likely being done purely from a EU regulatory standpoint but if they were lying about it they wouldn’t be making a big deal about it.
Also likely they see the future of social changing and would rather be the ones steering the standard.
I somewhat agree with you, but you could apply this same logic to Facebook's acquisition of WhatsApp. At the time they "made a big deal about" keeping the app separate from Facebook and maintaining users' privacy, but they were lying.
> At the time they "made a big deal about" keeping the app separate from Facebook and maintaining users' privacy, but they were lying.
I'm hardly going to defend Facebook/Meta, but by and large, WhatsApp is still separate from Facebook properties. It doesn't require connecting identities to any other Meta-owned property to use it, and all messages on it are end-to-end encrypted[0] - a change which happened after Facebook acquired WhatsApp. There was a proposed change about six months or a year ago, but it was walked back after public criticism.
There are a lot of things to criticize Facebook for, but WhatsApp has remained, at least so far, pretty independent - and if anything, more privacy-preserving than it was at the time Facebook acquired it.
Of all the independent products that Facebook has degraded over time and locked in to its walled garden (Instagram, Oculus, etc.), WhatsApp is the outlier, not the rule.
[0] Every time this is brought up on HN, it always devolves into a discussion about how "the client is not open-source so you can't trust it", followed by an inevitable segue into reproducible builds and federated clients, etc. etc.
They don't require you to connect your identities because they can do that for you by heavily encouraging you to add your phone number to all their apps. All metadata about where you are and who you're talking to goes to Facebook.
Imagine if instead of acquiring WhatsApp, Facebook allowed you to install its Messenger app and sign up with a phone number instead of a Facebook account. Would you then consider the Messenger app to be appropriately separate and independent from Facebook? It has end-to-end encryption.
> There was a proposed change about six months or a year ago, but it was walked back after public criticism.
Was that change ever walked back? I recall that Whatsapp wanted to send metadata (not the messages themselves, but phone numbers, IP addresses, etc) to Facebook/Meta for advertising purposes. I know it was delayed, but I deleted my Whatsapp account before having to accept the new terms.
When was the last time you saw one of these megacorps moving towards decentralization rather than away from it? I can't think of a single example. It seems fair to be skeptical.
It’s fair but skepticism needs to be informed. For example, Meta has made multiple public statements about federation. It’s certainly not like they can’t change their minds but there’s a risk to that in the current regulatory climate.
> For example, Meta has made multiple public statements about federation.
These are worth nothing, though?
The skepticism is informed by looking at the history of the company, not just what they're saying right now.
FWIW, I do think they will federate eventually. I don't think they'll do so because they want user accounts to actually move around, etc, etc. Strategically, it's valuable to keep a handle on the Fediverse, since they're big enough to exert control over it should they so choose, and they can be better positioned to do so if they start from a position of being federated.
"Threads won't be federated until proven otherwise" is a pretty reasonable take coming from exactly the "informed skepticism" stance you're talking about.
Yeah, I’m not saying that I like or trust them - only that the world has changed somewhat since 2016 and various governments are far more willing to regulate them than in the past.
In particular, note their public statements about this allowing you to keep your followers when deplatformed. It might be that this is the answer they want to give right-wing lawmakers: if you break our terms of service, you’re free to move to Truth Social.
Their very name (to me it's still Facebook) is a grift about decentralization. So of course they're keen to make multiple statements about it.
I don't fully agree with the article because I think they might cynically launch a useless ActivityPub integration. Or they'll do it only for business profiles or something...
Another thing is they could attempt to do it in a self-serving way with crypto like they did with Diem. That is they could be legitimately interested in NFT grifts but talking about ActivityPub because it's trendy right now. They have no timeline, so their first foray into ActivityPub could involve blockchain tech.
Why don’t they do it already, then? They have massive engineering resources. The software Mastodon uses is totally open, not some locked up trade secret that would require years of negotiations.
If Meta wanted to, Threads would already talk to Mastodon.
Because their target is Twitter, and the people fleeing it. So time to market is critical. A PM would be laser focused on shipping a product with the feature set needed to do that as quickly as possible. Integrating with the fediverse doesn't help that, so it probably not high on the priority list, even if they genuinely want do integrate with it.
It's been pretty difficult to scale Mastodon to even hundreds of thousands of users per instance when the users are following others across thousands of instances. Scaling that up to 30 million users is not easy. And you can tell the initial launch was rushed based on the limited app-only roll out, minimal features, and broken website. It's plausible that they will work on features and user growth first.
Maybe it’s because the app was just an idea 7 months ago. Maybe they’re working on scaling their user base with an MVP while slowly adding new features? Also it was explicitly stated by Zuck and Mosseri that this is an instagram product and is being worked on by the instagram team. It’s not something that every Meta employee and their best friend have a hand in.
Threads doesn’t even have a proper timeline yet. Last I heard you can’t even see your followed accounts. The database is directly built on top of Instagram’s as well.
ActivityPub integration is the least of their worries.
Baseless speculation is common in HN so it doesn’t surprise me.
Apple creates e2e encryption on a new product and HN screams that we still can’t trust them and we need to live in a fairday cage with zero human contact to truly not be tracked.
Or in this instance when Meta does a reasonable thing and the same people scream that they’re still evil and we can’t trust them and we’re gullible for thinking it’s a good product.
Some people are so anti establishment that they can’t acknowledge a good thing when they see it, I’m afraid.
You don't need to be pro or anti anything. With security, 95% doesn't get you there. Trusting a corporation doesn't get you there. You need transparency across the full stack, not just assurances from a private entity that isn't necessarily aligned with your interests. On top of that, there is plenty of precedent of corporations lying or doing a poor job with security and privacy.
Unless you are inexperienced or new to the field, you should have no excuse to not be aware of the endless examples over the last couple decades. Sneering at people doesn't make you correct.
I think, though, that they - like most of us I'm pretty sure - were assuming that Twitter would not hollow out quite as fast it appears to be, though, I'm taking everything I read with a big ol' shake of salt these days, and frequently there's a shot of medicinal alcohol involved too...
But if the statements purporting to be factual reports are true, the overall story, give or take, seems to be that they were planning to kinda piggyback on Mastodon to pump their numbers up in the early stage, and ideally, kinda deal it a big traffic blow, but maybe that's my cold Meta-hating heart having its say. Then, puffed up on the "easy" acquisition of the unique Mastodon traffic, then move on Musk.
But Musk really seems to be trying to just end the ordeal as quickly as possible at this point, and given that the majority of Twitter people seem to find Mastodon horrid and want a new Twitter, they might just put AP aside for the moment. One can only hope.
If they are going to do it and not back out then they should just put it into a irrevocable clause in their terms of service and promise to delete all user data and send all advertising revenue generated from the user to the user on request if they fail to fulfill their legally binding promise.
If they are committed to it then the clause has no effect. If they do back out and the customer feels betrayed and they feel like Meta lied to them to get them to signup then they can demand Meta to remove their presence and pay the amount Meta made off of them by tricking them.
Simple and clean solution with aligned incentives. If Meta does not intend to back out then they have nothing to lose.
On the threads app it seems clear that they want to support Mastodon in the future, all the usernames have an “@threads.net” label that doesn’t make sense to have unless they are going to support other URL’s in the future.
They have made a concerted effort to build up the groundwork - UI elements that make no sense if you aren't federating and the sign-up prompt explictly mentioning Mastodon. Hell, you've got engineers and management over there still talking about it as if it'll happen.
But you should probably treat it like you should treat phone manufacturers saying the next software update will solve all of the problems - you can only review what you have now, not what'll come in the future.
The current odds on Manifold, a prediction market which uses imaginary internet money (not crypto, real imaginary internet money), are currently 53% for the end of the year.
Easy way to double your imaginary internet money if you're confident of the real answer.
> Mana (Ṁ) is Manifold's play money. Use it to create and bet in questions.
Mana can't be converted into cash, but can be purchased and donated to charity at a ratio of Ṁ100 : $1.
Am I missing something here or are they saying "I'm allowed" to buy my own Mana in order to donate 1% of what I purchased to charity? Doesn't make much sense, or I'm not understanding it at all. I'm betting all my Mana on the latter.
I have not used the site but going through their FAQ, it looks like you have the ability to 1) buy more Mana and 2) Convert your Mana into charitable donations (that is paid not by you, but Manifold) [0]
Right but you can express skepticism on HN and get tons of imaginary internet points (karma) right now, whether or not you're right. So what's the point?
I wonder what the exchange rate between imaginary internet points gained whether the gainer is right or wrong, and imaginary internet points distributed according to your accuracy in making predictions (and I guess, also your desire to spend money buying more imaginary points), is?
We will have to see whether Threads can maintain daily active users the way Twitter and Mastodon can. At the moment, I'm not seeing any activity on Threads that is "native" to Threads, meaning that it isn't just Instagram posts that are cross-posted to this new platform Meta is trying to create. In comparison to BlueSky, I'm not really seeing much out of Threads. It's similar to how Google inflated their G+ numbers by making everyone with a Google Account automatically a G+ user. Hopefully, Meta is not making the same mistakes...
The primary difference being they aren't forcing instagram users to register with Threads - google was very clearly inflating their numbers in a way that threads/meta/facebook currently isn't.
It kinda is, though. I'm sure these numbers are all people who really have used Threads, but I'm also willing to bet that 99% of them are Instagram users. And most of the people you can follow on Threads are apparently Instagram users who never even activated Threads. Threads is really just an extension of Instagram, and not its own thing.
I'm sure it is, but the accounts are clearly linked. I've heard from several people that Threads recommended them to follow friends who hadn't signed up for Threads.
> It's similar to how Google inflated their G+ numbers by making everyone with a Google Account automatically a G+ user
To be clear, it's not like that at all.
Instagram users aren't automatically converted into Threads users. It requires a new app and an affirmative action by the user to create their Threads account using their Instagram login credentials.
Apart from it being a separate app it is the same. There’s a one to one mapping of instagram account to thread account, so closely intertwined that deleting your threads account deletes the IG one.
When you download facebook messenger as a separate app to facebook it’s the same thing… one account two apps
I did clarify at the end of the post. The analogy with Google and Google+ is spot on, and it’s clear that this is just another app tied to your Ig account just as messenger is an app tied to your Facebook account.
Not really the same because you need to... download Threads. It's just a sign in button.
Tell me. Do you know what's Facebook Lasso? It was also a FB app that used FB login. You remember Flash app? Why it flopped? What about IGTV? Used the Instagram account....
Social graph is important, but is not the most important thing, or else every dev would be rich by just using "Login with Google".
The reason 100 million signup here is because Twitter is tanking - there's a demand for a twitter-like social-network. Doesn't mean that people gonna use Threads of course.
And anyway, the case with Google is different because you didn't needed to download anything - they turned your account into Google+. Wanna comment something on Youtube? Ops, use Google+.
I figured connecting to Mastodon would serve as a PoC for tracking and marketing to people there. A kind of hedge that even if the fediverse took off, they could still make money from it.
That frankly sounds like a rather obvious use case for a big corporation. The Fediverse is entirely open, so if a company just creates their own server and follows people from all other servers, they can easily get access to all that open communication.
I've recently been thinking about whether it's possible to add some form of limited distribution using encryption. Perhaps hitch-hiking on WebAuthn public keys? I have no idea if that would work, though.
In normal operation, Mastodon doesn't send all it's public posts to everyone. It only sends posts that someone on the receiving end has subscribed to.
This can be confusing for beginning users. There is a link in the interface for "global posts". It doesn't actually show all posts, only the public ones that someone on your instance has subscribed to. For someone on a small-ish instance with like minded people this is a good thing, as it means there's a higher chance of a post being interesting to me.
Not entirely. It is possible to see posts from people you're not following. I'm not sure how Mastodon does it exactly (I'm not on Mastodon, but the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon), but I think it also has a tab where you can see other content. In the end, if any user on a server follows the poster, the post will end up on that server, and it's up to the server to decide who gets to see it, which could be everybody.
I mentioned that, didn't I? Or am I misunderstanding you?
> There is a link in the interface for "global posts". It doesn't actually show all posts, only the public ones that someone on your instance has subscribed to.
> some form of limited distribution using encryption
I can't claim to know what your exact vision is, but that seems to line up with AUTHORIZED_FETCH [0], an existing (off by default) setting on Mastodon servers.
They have a lot of users, but do they have a lot of interesting people? Being from Europe threads is not a thing for me, but my “SoMe network” is pretty solid on Mastodon. Most of the people I want to read “tweets” from left Twitter sometime last year, well, many are now both on Twitter and Mastodon. Anyway, despite its tiny user bass compared to Twitter, almost every single person or organisation that I followed on Twitter is on Mastodon, and while that’s anecdotal, I do think that the users Meta cares about aren’t necessarily those 70 million.
I suspect it’s a tough balancing act. One where you need the interesting accounts as well as the masses, because you can’t have the masses without interesting things and you can’t have advertisement revenue without the masses.
I don’t actually think Threads has too much to worry about from Mastodon. Personally I think something “better” is needed before we get any real Twitter replacement, but I can see why Meta would want to keep the door open. So that if they can’t get the “interesting” accounts to join, they can still get the content from those accounts by linking up to Mastodon. Well, that or maybe Meta is actually gearing up to become the SoMe that doesn’t lock its platforms down. The EU is likely not going to stop by forcing messaging apps to speak with each other after all, and there is obviously a lot of value in being the “phone book” of the world.
Sure, I can totally believe that Threads is a dystopian wasteland of vapid influencer "content" and no content of interest.
But if the theory is that you need Mastodon to bring in the interesting content because their 100M userbase can't or won't produce that content, the federation would be needed indefinitely. It won't be that federating with Mastodon for a year bootstraps their own content production. If people writing interesting things aren't willing to go to a platform with 100M users now, they won't be willing to do it in an year either.
1. A lot of Instagram users who had an extremely low barrier to entry, which could mean a low intention to post.
2. Little organic content.
3. Influencers and bots wanting to be "First!".
4. The people hyping it are almost exclusively using it to hate on Musk. Not Twitter, but Musk. Very few people are actually excited about giving Meta more data.
I don't user any of this garbage so I don't know or care. But I think it's entirely reasonable to acknowledge that the people on Mastadon want to post and use it, and that bots basically have no interest. It's small, but actually organic content.
Let's be honest about what Mastodon has: a puny bit of rather nerdy content, most of it available elsewhere. Threads does not need it. May the two worlds stay separated forever.
This is just simple minded thinking. Of course a bot doesn't care, but it's owners absolutely do care. If you think bots will not infect Mastodon, you're seriously limiting your critical thinking skills.
They don't need to deprecate the connection. Power users that care about privacy will be on Mastodon. Casual users that follow them and don't care because they want a polished experience will remain on Threads.
Meta can have its cake and eat it to by being happy with owning the vast majority of the Fediverse. As a bonus, this appeases regulators.
Yeah. This is really the only smart decision Meta could make, in my opinion. Might even be the start of something semi-decent, which I never thought I'd say about Meta.
Personal experience, is that this is extremely user dependent (it is a fair argument that 0 is the correct number of these accounts to ever see).
Much like TikTok [1], Instagram zones in on your preferences, and from my experience, does so with the same mechanism - time spent watching any piece of content.
The best demonstrator for this was a meme I can't find anymore, where some teens held a race to see who saw "coombait" first. Some conked within 10 seconds, some took a full minute (of relentless scrolling, that is) to find it.
But your feed has to start somewhere, and those defaults are opinionated. The defaults, both tiktok and insta, seem to decide men want to see titties, and they are right enough often enough. Sure, some men might be able to escape those defaults, if they religiously ignore any content they don't like and don't accidentally click on anything or are perfect in their use, but most people aren't.
That's absolutely fair. Would love to see someone try to empirically prove what these defaults are, but I imagine this is hard. If this already exists, someone please link it!
While trying to figure what "coombait" means, I found another comment of yours, which is essentially the same as this one, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36637971 That doesn't seem very "novel" :)
Which, also contained the answer to what "coombait" is:
> What is 'coombait'?
> Porn adjacent material. Technically SFW usually but not the kind of thing you want your coworkers seeing you look at.
I don't think I've encountered anyone who thinks Facebook is going to do "a job that is good for customers". I do believe they're going to a pretty _effective_ job of serving their own interests.
Can someone explain what this coombait is? Is it like an anti-porn moral issue? It seems to be more of like a TVTropes-type term when I try to look it up, confused by how people use it on this website.
Content that intends to excite you sexually on a platform that is not generally considered a place you go to for sexual excitement.
There's a lot of softcore porn on these sites that are arguably pushed at children who might not even seek it out. Does a mom know that she has to block twitch and instagram when she blocks pornhub?
> Does a mom know that she has to block twitch and instagram when she blocks pornhub?
Yes? It's the task of parents to monitor what their children do on the internet and how they use social media, not Instagram's. What is it with this new generation of morally enraged prudes coming after every platform because they outsourced parenting to an ipad?
Also I'm fairly certain looking at hot people is why 90% of users are on instagram. It's like when tumblr banned porn, probably worst mistake ever made in internet moderation history
> looking at hot people is why 90% of users are on instagram.
Hehe, this is also why I was confused!
And yeah, knowing more context now, I agree re parenting. Just feels like common sense that one needs to treat all social media as at least as bad/unsuitable as a British tabloid.
The problem I'm attempting to approach is that there is plenty of legitimate, genuine, not necessarily harmful to a child content on say youtube and twitch, but these kind of sites are often skirting lines around sexually explicit content for kids, because it's hella profitable. Look at the "youtube kids" nonsense with pregnant elsa, or the "just chatting" and "hot tub" sections of twitch where influencers have quite literally flashed their audience, "by accident", while they make hundreds of thousands of dollars from actual children.
When television was invented, there were various societal reasons (ie prudishness) you could be pretty sure that your child watching TV wouldn't be exposed to anything "too heinous" even if the parent put zero effort into parenting.
Sure, we don't have to be as absurdly puritan as we were back in the fifties but at the same time maybe "require every parent to be a near expert in childhood development and media consumption and whether your teenager is watching too many boobs in places there maybe shouldn't be boobs" isn't the panacea some people seem to think. At the very least, companies shouldn't be taking money from kids through the medium of softcore porn, and arguably they shouldn't even if they are funded by advertising to those kids instead of like "bits" and donations.
I don't really think we should allow "selling softcore porn and sex to teenagers" as a business model. Porn isn't inherently bad, but kids aren't mentally developed enough to make smart decisions about paying for porn.
If your suggested solution is "watch every single thing your child does 24/7", that's not a solution, and it won't work for most people. We shouldn't be leaving less privileged families to be freely exploited just because they don't have the time, or resources to properly moderate their children's media consumption. Mom works 80 hours a week, when is she supposed to research how to keep her child from being seduced by sex workers and parasocial relationships?
Erotic content posted on social media or inserted in suggested content feeds to attract/retain attention, from what I can tell.
I try not to use endless-scrolling social media too much, so I don't know to what degree it is an issue as the OP suggests, but it's not hard to see how it would foster pornography addiction.
Everyone seems to ignore that Threads may be interested in the rest of Fediverse: Wordpress and (if it ever integrates) Tumblr. It also secures them easy access to any other potential developments, such as Lemmy.
While Fediverse integration adds moderation complexity, I see few downsides for them to integrate and stay integrated. The portion of Mastodon that hates Facebook seems determined to segregate itself.
Meta has no incentive to add Mastodon/ActivityPub integration ever.
Things like mastodon represent a Jailbreaking of the captive user. If the goal is to monetize the consumer as the product, you could do no worse than to free that consumer from the cattle yard and offer them the ability to graze at their discretion alone.
> Meta has no incentive to add Mastodon/ActivityPub integration ever.
Given regulatory issues with data sharing between different Meta properties they have a massive incentive to add activitypub support. It would be an easy way to appease to the regulators.
And yet they’re doing it anyway! Maybe their goal actually isn’t to monetize the user this time. They haven’t even put ads on the platform yet, and senior leadership said ads weren’t even in the conversation about product development yet.
Maybe the goal is to create a new social network to fill the void that Elon’s Twitter 2.0 left. Maybe a company can actually do a genuinely decent thing every once in a while…
After Facebook Chat and Google dropped XMPP, I don't think professionals can be expected to believe that support of open standards will happen. It's a simple business move, to lock people in, and recent business history also showed that people don't mind this much, as in, they won't leave for a more open product on this principle alone. So what we can expect is more lock-in.
1. Twitter founder founded BlueSky as he was distressed with things he had to do to get capital and wanted a twitter successor that is community based and funded...hence bluesky's out in the open connection to mastadon via similar protocols.
2. Meta Threads is just way to revitalize FB which has an advertising spying on users upcoming problem with EU out lawing it. Hence Meta's focus on US market solution only.
> Twitter founder founded BlueSky as he was distressed with things he had to do to get capital and wanted a twitter successor that is community based and funded...hence bluesky's out in the open connection to mastadon via similar protocols
BlueSky doesn't connect to Mastodon. It uses a different protocol for federation.
Supporting ActivityPub can be done in a million ways and Facebook will likely do it in a way where they keep control of users.
If you think they won't, mention something they have done where users remain in control of... anything?
Nope, they want the opposite – for you to stay in the Threads app and get tracked/watch ads. The fact that you can pull content from all over the Fediverse in the app to stay busy is just a bonus. They are now able to monetize all that content for free.
I doubt facebook will want to show ads where they don't have any control over the context that they are shown in due to the insane difficulty of dealing with brand safety once you do that. This is almost certainly a big reason reddit never tried to support advertising in 3rd party clients.
And the larger Mastodon instances aren't going to connect to Threads either:
1) to protect their users from Meta inhaling user data, and as a source of spam, harassment etc. If Threads is not defederated upfront, it would be blocked soon after.
2) The sheer volume from the data from Threads is not going to be manageable.
> to protect their users from Meta inhaling user data
If you're running a public Mastodon instance, Facebook has surely, one way or another, managed to "inhale" your user data, at least for market research. Only way to avoid that is to run a private instance, and then connecting to Threads/Facebook/Meta wouldn't be a threat regardless.
> to protect their users from Meta inhaling user data, and as a source of spam, harassment etc. If Threads is not defederated upfront, it would be blocked soon after.
Mastodon doesn't protect user data in any meaningful way. That data is all available to meta if they want it.
> Mastodon doesn't protect user data in any meaningful way
That may be true (yes, I've seen Bloonface's essay on this), but it doesn't mean that Threads will be federated with the rest of Mastodon, i.e. allowing user interaction across instances, threads content showing up on other mastodon user's feeds and vice versa. Blocking that is what "defederated" means.
Threads will support ActivityPub. They already have UI elements in place for it in the app (like showing your home server domain on your profile), so there's no reason to believe that isn't their intention. The problem, if any, will be on the other end. Plenty of Mastodon/Fediverse servers have already stated their intention of blocking Meta's access to their networks, so even in the best case the end result will be a fragmented mess.