I understand the Meta hate, but joining a very explicitly public and intentionally republishable service and then being unhappy that your data is public and intentionally republishable is bizarre to me.
The irony to me is that any chance of relevance for a protocol is obviously going to need big players like meta to sign up (and that's a good thing for the protocol).
A weird set of circumstances might have aligned where meta sees an advantage in being part of a federated protocol to commoditize a threat to themselves (twitter, bluesky, etc.) and still hold a dominant position in quality of the end user clients (which is the only thing 99% of users care about).
It's a little funny a lot of the mastodon hosts are up in arms about this, but not that surprising when considering what they're actually getting out of being part of it (the identity stuff that comes along with being a mastodon user).
I'd guess similar stuff was said during the eternal september era of the web itself - simply being an internet user was no longer an identity that meant something culturally specific.
Please define "thrive" in this context. Do you mean DAU/MAUs? I know, perhaps, a couple hundred people and respect the opinions/ideas of perhaps a few dozen others I don't know.
Those are the only people I care about interacting with and I can interact with them just fine without Meta's "offerings."
AFAICT, ActivityPub is thriving. It has an active user base, is under active development and doesn't "productize" its users.
I'm not trying to be a jerk here, I just don't understand how you're defining "thrive" in this context.
You won't get any argument about that from me.
That said, what's needed is more instances, not a single instance with a hundred million users.
What's more, how likely is it that the Meta dev folks will want to share bug fixes/enhancements/etc? And even if they did, how many of them are there?
I'd rather see 100 new Fediverse instances of a wide variety, with a bunch of different folks contributing than a Meta monoculture.
That's not to say I object to Threads. AP is open source. Meta can use/not use federate/not federate the software as they choose. And if they actually do federate and bring new devs and instances along with them, that's great!
I just don't think we need Meta for AP to thrive. It's been doing just fine so far, and will continue to do so with or without Meta.
I’m 100% with you that more diversity is needed, but if Threads actually federates, I’m optimistic that it will help feed the broader ecosystem.
Example: download the supposedly privacy-focused app pCloud on your iPhone, start it up, and check what IPs it's hitting. That's right, it's hitting facebook tracking servers.
This is not a tribal ingroup club thing. It's a "fuck off, megacorps" thing.
I thought "mastodon.social" was based in Germany, heart of GDPR country but there is no consent theater, no harassment by cookie popups, certainly no controls over data.
I really don't mind, but there is some serious cognitive dissonance there.
If you are a "sexworker" (sic) and you doxx yourself tough luck.
If you reveal your mental illness through the things you write about and the language patterns you use tough luck. (Pro tip: machine learning algorithms can read your social media posts and psychodiagnose you better than the psychiatric nurse practitioner you'll struggle to get an appointment with.)
People get these spams inviting them to play games where they ask questions trying to gather their answers to break into their bank account such as "What was the name of your first pet?" Even if you didn't have a tendency to be paranoid maybe you should.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/7280#issuecommen...
#1 is "consent theater" which I am not noticing, maybe I missed it. Even if I give consent to one server am I really giving consent to any other server? Can any other server be bound to my agreement with the first server? #2 is a "polite request" and not a guaranteed property of the platform. #3 seems to be satisfied.
Comparing the sheer amount of data that Meta/Facebook vacuums up to the privacy practices of similar apps is instructive.
https://www.wired.com/story/meta-twitter-threads-bluesky-spi...
In practical terms, Facebook is actually quite tame compared to any other malicious actor who can get the same data. FB just wants it for ads and processes it in aggregate (most is never seen by a human), while other malicious actors might actually target you personally.
The main issue is that you shouldn't post anything on a public, unauthenticated network that you wouldn't want random, potentially-hostile actors to see.
It's the same effect as any platform that tries "free speech" invariably becomes a nazi echo chamber, because the only people who WANT to use the less popular system are those that CAN'T or REALLY REALLY REALLY cling to their ideology.
So indeed, most people (normies) will naturally flow towards larger and more mainstream instances. It's already tilting in that direction and actively encouraged in the signup process.
As these instances grow, they will simply have more disagreeable posts (from the perspective of the ideological instances) leading to even more defederation, hence the split will become ever harder over time.