Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you’re a server admin, please defederate Meta’s domain “threads.net”
If you don’t run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate “threads.net”.
I’m not too worried about Threads joining the metaverse. What Mark Zuckerberg has failed to realise is just how barebones his Twitter clone is.
Mastodon has support for trending topics and hashtags. Threads doesn’t. Lacking such an absolutely basic feature that any microblogging platform would otherwise support is why Threads dropped from 500M active users to just a fraction of it.
I joined it near launch, made a few posts and then stopped. There is nothing worthwhile on Threads and I don’t think leeching on to the fediverse.
Also, I can kinda understand why you all rushed to defederate from Gab when they tried to jump on the federation bandwagon, but not Meta.
Zuckerberg doesn’t need us to overtake X. He needs to actually make a functional social media app first, then put more resources into moderating it.
X is still on top despite Elon Musk’s stewardship because his competitors are either too small (most federated instances), require too big of a technical hurdle for the average Joe to use (the fediverse in general), or are downright incompetent (Threads.)
This take is riddled with naivety.
Not only will Meta read, train AI on, aggregate and datamine, and correlate this data with your real identity, but when Meta announces that “the easiest way to be on the fediverse is to just use Threads” then all the people who avoided Mastodon because it was “too complicated” to sign up, all the people who are basically already signed up because they scroll Insta all day, will go with Threads instead of spreading the load out.
As smaller instances start to drop off under the load, under the lack of interest as threads grows and they shrink, merely mirroring the traffic of a centralized corporate entity, users start to flock to threads for its reliability and speed.
Then Meta pulls the plug, since “no one really used this ActivityPub thing anyway, it was too technical”.
Threads isn’t about beating “X” (lol X is in a death spiral, it’s only a matter of time), it’s about ensuring the Fediverse never rises up.
See what happened with Google Talk and XMPP.
They undoubtedly do this already. There’s nothing stopping them from setting up an instance that looks like a personal one and pulling all the data the Fediverse has to offer.
I’m worried because it’s only gonna be a matter of time before fakebook is able to play around enough to get threads to be functional enough for the average user. They may be evil, but they aren’t dumb.