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Comment by dawnerd | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Like the time they promised they wouldn't connect the Whatsapp phone number database to facebook?

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.

> Meta

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.

It is informed, by both the endless precedents set by Facebook/meta and large corporations in general.

"Threads won't be federated until proven otherwise" is a pretty reasonable take coming from exactly the "informed skepticism" stance you're talking about.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It seems likely that Threads launched slightly early, to take advantage of Twitter shooting itself in the foot particularly dramatically last week.

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.

If it ever comes to the EU, which is doubtful because of the recent ECJ decision: https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1678429019442749442

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/10/23789695/eu-us-transatlan...

That's not relevant to the ECJ decision.

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.

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