Deciding to federate means accepting content from that other site. A mastodon instance federating with Threads would mean that Threads content would be visible on that instance.
However, if an instance decides to not federate with Threads, Threads can still get the data from the instance.
With the permisivity of the protocol, Meta (and anyone) can consume any ActivityPub data they want.
Compare this to email. A mail server can block incoming mail from some other mail server (e.g. a known spam farm). However, mail servers don't block people who have email accounts on their servers from sending mail to abuse@spammy.mail.server
Trying to change it so that federated content only goes out to pre-approved sites (because face it - if threads.meta.com is blocked it is would be trivial to spin up notthreads.notmeta.com and consume the same data) would fracture the fediverse and make small sites difficult to federate with... and lead to very much what we currently see with email - you can't stand up your own email server and send mail to gmail... which is very much what federation is supposed to not be about.
This is the common case but AFAIK doesn’t have to be true. Mastodon lets users make their AP outboxes private. Followers can be screened before posts are sent to their instances.
Well, in practice it's pretty easy to block Facebook-range IP addresses at the firewall level, and then there's no other way for Facebook to get (authenticated) information about posts/users. "Will admins end up going that far" is an open question, but it's not like Facebook is going to be renting out residential IPs and forging user-agents to get around these types of bans.
Trying to prevent Meta from being able to consume ActivityPub content is an arms race that Meta would win with the collateral damage being every small instance of an ActivityPub application.
That collateral damage would be inflicted by other ActivityPub instances rather than Meta itself.
Is that within the context of Meta wanting to ingest data from Mastodon in order to train their AI or whatever data they want to ingest? Of course they can do that, setup their own instance or their own cloud, and ingest a lot of the posts coming out of the main Mastodon instances. Any company can do it, and it has nothing to do with Threads being on ActivityPub. You don't even need to go that far! You can add .rss to any user on Mastodon and get a fully public feed of their activity (if they didn't put their profile private)
Or are you arguing that Meta can ingest Mastodon posts within Threads without the consent of Mastodon instances? Because that's quite unlikely, they said they want to be good citizen of the federation. If a server is not federating with them, then they will just obey the block and won't go around those blocks to show content in Threads even if the users/instances decided not to be federated with Threads
(But I still don’t think meta is going to enable activitypub)
https://lemmy.world/post/1232070
And a Mastodon instance (mastodon.lol) from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34748195 (though there was some warning)
The image they're looking for is on Wayback machine, if that's helpful: https://web.archive.org/web/20230614091556/https://vlemmy.ne...
Everything people found complicated about Mastodon is there in Bluesky in some form.
The bigger issue currently is that there is a problem where the did:plc method used for all the currently issued did's is stupidly centralised. Though if Bluesky were to mess that up badly enough there in theory nothing really stopping other parties from deciding to crawl the audit log and take over processing of DID's if clients agree.
They do certainly need to fix that DID bullshit, though, or they have a chokehold that is worse than the bsky.social domain.
It's the rough outlines of a good idea but a really dumb mechanism full of the idiotic NIH issues that you can find throughout. I'm certainly no fan of the protocol, and their "why not ActivityPub" part just demonstrates that they don't really understand either ActivityPub nor the space.
E.g you don't need a stable ID and they made a stupid choice in assuming so. The recovery keys allowing the user to update the DID could equally be used to sign claims about a change of id and push them to the followers/following. As such the recovery key part is good - it's all the Fediverse would need to adopt to be able to let users do unilateral migrations (coupled with regular backups/exports; frankly having a standard API for the clients to pull that would be good).
I at least know I never had to set up any kind of recovery key for my Bluesky account, so I assume this is handled on bsky.social even though my handle is @ my domain.
It's also funny how folks here don't realize that this is all related to the Digital Services Act in the EU which gatekeepers like Meta have to interoperate with other open protocols such as ActivityPub to allow users to move off of their platforms and to not incentivise lock-in. Meta would not risk not doing so especially with a new platform that has just captured 100M users in less than a week.
So yes. Meta is serious about federation [0], especially when they sent the NDAs to the admins of the largest Mastodon instances which haven't denied federating with Meta. Contrary to the denial I've seen in the comments here on HN.
[0] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2023Jul/00...
Some people seem intent on causing drama, but most actual server admins seem to just ignore Threads until it becomes a problem.
The drama lives on and on.
Freedom of Association is just as important and key part of Freedom as Speech, though many, especially Americans, tend to forget that it exists as a related Right. Blocking on Mastodon isn't a bug, it's a feature. Drama from blocking on Mastodon is maybe a bug, but criticism and deliberation and community opinion gathering and consensus building are features (and Freedom of Speech) that sometimes look like drama. People expecting useful criticism and deliberation to "kill" Mastodon because "drama" are missing that process survives iteratively and the process isn't a bug.
de-federation puts the power directly in the communities hands. if Meta wants to join with out EEE tactics, theyll need to first prove anyone on Mastodon sees value in a facebook presence.
Mastodon is not and will never be "normie" friendly, so it'll never be a contender. Sorry, just the way it is.
Time will tell how things play between Twitter and Threads, but Twitter seems to be taking some interesting steps towards maintaining it's relevance.
Mastodon was always a joke and still is.
Threads has 100 million users already. We'll see if they maintain.
But sure, if my usage was reacting to the masked singer or the Chiefs winning another game, mastodon would probably be useless.
Threads is a entirely different kettle of fish. A significant number of the people I follow are ALREADY more active, or just as active, on Threads as Twitter. A fair number have stopped posting on Twitter entirely.
Why? If they federate, I can follow people who post on Threads, but I get a chronological timeline I control and no ads. They make money on ads. So why should they federate? To "slurp up everything"? They already have much more than Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse have.
The thing you get from federation is more granular social graph data than you can obtain from public scraping. Not just "X liked this post" but also "when did X like this post?"
Meta specializes in social graph analysis. More data leads to more insights, which leads to more targeting for advertisements in places they do control. There's the direct profitability angle.
Additionally, it will make Meta's properties feel more "complete" or connected to the rest of the world (despite many people's distaste for Meta as a company and their business practices). Being able to stay in touch with Meta objectors through ActivityPub will lead to more social pressure (or inertia, depending on your perspective) to stay locked into Meta properties for their incumbent users.
They only stand to gain from this plan. There is a cost, of course: Some CPU is expended that doesn't include adverts. But they've probably done the math and concluded that they can accept that hit and still profit.
And you haven't mentioned the moderation costs to Meta. They'd have to decide who to federate with, which instances to block, which accounts to block.
What about my comment obligates me, in any way, to mention that? It seems like an odd thing to demand.
What's going to happen is: the far-right pockets are ad-unfriendly (ad-adverse?), so they're out. But the far-left instances are anti-corporate, so they'll block Meta. What remains are heavily skewed towards the statist democrat types who are generally civil and well-mannered. I wouldn't expect the moderation burden to be too heavy from that crowd. The only significant moderation cost will be if Zucc abandons all sense and federates with instances that allow right-wing extremists. That would be an expensive blunder.
(Still stupidly rate-limited on my main account, so have to reply from this one. Dang it.)
It's kind of their carrot to get good will and PR from the vocal-but-small nerd-crowd though I think. Facebook could outright block people with adblockers; but don't as an example because (people would throw a shitfit). Good PR/Vibes from federating could go far fighting the 'ewe meta' stigma attached to Threads.
That would surely get them banned in a lot more instances, but I guess it would technically be possible for them to make 1 in 10 of your posts an ad.
It sure seems like a terrible idea to me, I'm just trying imagine how exactly they could make it go from an interesting idea of federating, to something that is terrible as meta is one to do.
I think probably the real reason they are federating is to avoid anti-trust issues.
There'd be nothing stopping that celebrity from shilling for a product on their Threads feed and their followers would all get any such shilling. There's already some of that on Mastodon, which is OK if instances permit it (authors, artists and small businesses promoting themselves).
c/daily/monthly
Instagram has 100 million accounts.
Those of use old enough remember the drama when AOL users were set free on the internet, with email and web access...
~~Can we not do that thing where we mock autistic people throwing a fit? (That's what /\b[Rr][Ee]{2,}\b/ means.)~~