What to Know about Threads
blog.joinmastodon.org
blog.joinmastodon.org
Ok, but what happens when millions of people on threads.net follow people on Mastodon servers, interact with their posts via reply/favorite/boost, send them private messages, etc.?
And how are Mastodon instances going to deal with spam coming from Threads? I know a lot of Mastodon instance administrators were already annoyed by spam coming from mastodon.social, but Threads could be orders of magnitude worse, and will Meta even care about that? As a Mastodon user, you can't really report spam directly to Meta.
So better prepare yourself for the scale or otherwise experience regular downtime, unless Meta is footing the bill for the biggest instances to stay up.
Some instances are planning to defederate from Threads immediately, so they'll be fine. And other instances may be forced to defederate eventually, whether they like it or not.
>There are comparisons to be made between Meta adopting ActivityPub for its new social media platform and Meta adopting XMPP for its Messenger service a decade ago. There was a time when users of Facebook and users of Google Talk were able to chat with each other and with people from self-hosted XMPP servers, before each platform was locked down into the silos we know today. What would stop that from repeating? Well, even if Threads abandoned ActivityPub down the line, where we would end up is exactly where we are now. XMPP did not exist on its own outside of nerd circles, while ActivityPub enjoys the support and brand recognition of Mastodon.
Isn't this a bit naive? The risk I see is that Threads embraces ActivityPub, gets its claws into the Mastodon network, gets loads of people subscribing to Threads accounts (and vice versa), and then starts adding features or "improving" the protocol. Mastodon instances have a choice between either staying interoperable by keeping up with the FB version of ActivityPub, or creating a schism, which users might not like. Ultimately Facebook could end up in the driver's seat of the protocol.
This is false. While it's true that Google Talk did adopt XMPP for a time, Facebook never did. They ran a little client bridge so that people could sort-of use third-party clients, but you could never communicate between Google Talk and Facebook users over XMPP.
Whichever company/organisation can provide the thing that Twitter users actually want will get the crown.
Mastodon didn't "miss", because it was never trying to replace Twitter. It's an alternative to Twitter that's non-corporate, which Threads is definitely not.
Moreover, Threads said they intend to federate with Mastodon. Although many Mastodon instances said they intend to defederate immediately with Threads. In any case, Mastodon will continue on with its devoted user base, which is very small in comparison to Twitter and Instagram but large enough to be self-sustaining.
I'm sorry. It missed, big time and now it is letting an adversary (Meta) to invade into Mastodon.
Mastodon is tending to centralisation no matter what it does.
All the smaller instances better have great CDNs backing them.
This is not really an argument...
That's not for you to decide.
We both know that Mastodon, Mastodon.social and the rest of the fediverse had many chances for adoption during Musk's fuckups.
And it still didn't take off the way Threads did.
Isn't the whole point of Mastodon supposed to be a privacy advocating and decentralised alternative to Twitter?
Threads's launch is just going to centralise Mastodon to the biggest servers, and onto Threads itself which defeats the point of Mastodon.
> Isn't the whole point of Mastodon supposed to be a privacy advocating and decentralised alternative to Twitter?
Yes. Whereas Threads is privacy destroying and centralized.
> Threads's launch is just going to centralise Mastodon to the biggest servers
How so?
> and onto Threads itself
How so?
To be sure, if and when Threads supports ActivityPub (it launched without such support), it will immediately become the biggest ActivityPub server in the world. On the other hand, many Mastodon instances are vowing to immediately defederate from Threads, and other Mastodon instances may be forced to defederate because of spam and/or traffic. So it's not clear how long that Threads will even last among the ActivityPub community at large.
On the other hand, it's unclear whether Instagram/Threads users are even interested in communicating with Mastodon users, and vice versa, so maybe they'll coexist on the ActivityPub protocol while largely ignoring each other. The fact that Threads shipped without ActivityPub support shows that ActivityPub is not essential to Meta's plans. (That feels like a bit of a relief to me.)
This is inevitable, whether you block Threads or not, any tech savvy celebrity that chose a Mastodon instance is now on Threads.
Instance blocking Threads will cause those who follow that person to move over to a centralised Mastodon instance that hasn't blocked Threads.
From here they will continue to follow / interact with them if they choose to.
“Federation”