BBC gives up on Threads, sticks with Mastodon | Hacker News Reader

BBC gives up on Threads, sticks with Mastodon

darnell.day

484 pointscmrdporcupine279 comments

>relatively active on mastodon

ah yes, with a whopping 2 to 4 posts for the last week (about a dozen or two for a whole month), and a grand total of 50-100 posts. while some other accounts on that server haven't posted anything since august. "it's not even nearly as abandoned as the other thing". sure. meanwhile, twitter gets a bunch of posts daily, and for radio 5, even their facebook page is more active (while 4's page is kinda abandoned since last year). "well what does this tell us about the state of platforms?" honestly, literally nothing. it just shows some strange gaps in bbc's social efforts and lack of automated posting in some places (even where they do seemingly have that figured out, like fb).

Fair. Without doubt, there's some bias/aspiration in OP's post. There is, though, a kernel of interest in the confluence of Mastodon/ActivityPub and mainstream media outlets. The latter have become subservient to the social media platforms and it has, at best, been an uneasy alliance for them. Twitter/X has probably been the most successful; Meta's disagreement in Canada [0] is towards the other end.

Mastodon/ActivityPub presents a chink of opportunity for mainstream media. Rather than being subservient to 3rd party platforms, they can run their own - e.g. social.bbc. Users can sign up and follow who they like, see what they like, and not be subjected to the commercial drivers of a 3rd party platform and its selection algorithms.

Of course, that's a huge risk for extant platforms. Meta's intention to federate Threads is pretty clearly an effort to counter that potential threat.

It would also need a significant level of investment, commitment and coordination among the broadcasters. So it's definitely in the "possible" rather than "probable" bucket.

Which brings us back to the OP. It can justly be seen as hope over evidence, at least at the moment. But there is at least an opportunity underpinning it.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/canada-news-facebook-meta-instagram-1850...

> Meta's intention to federate Threads is pretty clearly an effort to counter that potential threat.

I'm starting to get the impression they aren't very serious about that. I expected if they were going to do it, they would have done it by now.

I don't expect the same of other products that have announced intent to federate such as Flickr and Tumblr, as they're much older codebases and the companies don't have Meta's resources.

It's just some people seeking to pit mastodon and threads against each other, no matter what with no limit to dishonesty when it's "against a big bad corporation". Sure, they can go ahead, it just might look ridiculous. The 'my secret club!'-ness is showing. There's some faint thread of 'disdain of masses' with mastodon, with stuff like backlash against potential influx of hundreds of millions of people, which they seemingly do not want to happen. It's kind of a strange paradoxical angle on information availability. Which also makes it only weirder for stuff like this that pretends to care about whether there's a news outlet out there serving information to public, when that public getting on is treated like a problem.

There is some kind of a fork for twitter-like platforms with a question of 'do they want for it to actually become a platform that could/would serve hundreds of millions of users'. It seems like it leans more towards 'no' than otherwise. Not even technologically, but just 'based on vibes'.

And he said it's "ironic" that the BBC is still on Twitter - that comment confused me.

I lost interest in Threads once their product guy said news is not a priority for them. One of the main reasons I use Twitter to catch up on world events from trustworthy sources.

Also earthquakes. Living in the California, I'm actually very impressed with Twitter's trending searches. I can always find few people tweeting about earthquake within 10seconds of an earthquake.

If you listen to Zuckerberg's interview with Alex Heath it's clear what they meant.

They are interested in breaking news, sports etc. They are just trying to avoid the platform turning into the polarising mess that Twitter is right now. And so they've been trying to position the app as more holistic than just politics and news.

Hashtags and trending searches are next on their roadmap. And I suspect that there is some technical work on their part to upgrade the underlying Instagram platform to support more real-time updates to the feed. Once that happens news will inevitably become a bigger part of Threads.

I like the UI design of Threads and I’m trying to enjoy the app, but it keeps flooding my feed with desperate, attention-seeking women in suggestive clothing and positions. I never have this problem on X.

I don‘t use Instagram often, but I recently met a girl irl who wanted to connect. I open the search in the app and it instantly recommends exclusively girls showing off their bodies, even though I only follow friends otherwise. It was quite embarrassing.

Then you probably want mastodon. Chronological feeds are the only option there!

Stop looking at thirsty girls on the gram then. In my experience it shows you more of what you look at.

It's showing me a lot of luxury handbag influencers that obviously target a very different demographic. I'm absolutely sure I never looked for anything like that (I follow mostly science/scientist accounts and comics and I'm male). I also keep getting ads for commercial pilot insurance and I'm definitely not in that demographic either. Instagram's recommendation model seems to work well if you fit a common categorization well (women interested in luxury handbags perhaps), and utterly break down when you don't. I'm a software engineer, I don't need specialty carts to move Boeing aircraft engines.

No, it just shows what your "demographic" mostly wants. And unfortunately for me as a gay man, the average straight man thirsts after scantily clad chicks on insta etc, even if they have to demean and debase themselves for a crumb of attention.

Google's getting wiser tho, I went from getting insta thirst ads to getting anime weaboo girl ads, to getting half naked dragon girl ads, until finally I recently got advertised some gay furry stuff. Nice.

Talk to us about these half naked dragon girls...

Ahaha, well I'm pretty sure it was for some heavily monetised crapware with art that you can pretty much find on e6 anyways.

That said, chatgpt is pretty decent at role playing, if you know how to trick it into it (still actually not that hard). It's an interesting topic though; some people are resistant to playing that sort of "game" with it, even though those people are fine with in-game romances such as those in Mass Effect and Baldur's Gate.

As a very casual Instagram user, I had a similar experience to the parent comment (not so much now).

From what I can tell, this is the way Instagram recommendations treat cold start users. It was only when I started liking stuff that they went away.

Thirstbait is the default for these companies. I don't access YouTube with any Google cookies so their profiling is suppressed. They periodically load up their front page with T&A content despite never having a personal history of clicking on such content.

Confirmed. I tried tiktok but was flooded with 3/4 naked teenage girls before I could do anything on the platform. It's like they ignored my onboarding preferences completely and just said here...she so thirsty.

Instagram thought I was a black women for the longest time, and was serving me content geared toward black women.

I have never posted, liked a post, and follow family exclusively. I keep clicking the "not interested" option but it hasn't changed anything.

It was strange but comforting to know Meta doesn't have shit on me.

This was happening to me too (Instagram but same thing); it’s pretty easy to fix.

Ultimately it is because I wasn’t using Instagram actively enough so the algorithm defaulted to Late 20s Male profiling.

Spend 2-5 minutes selecting the posts you don’t want to see and training the algorithm.

Instagram: Press and hold on items on the search tab and select “not interested”. To give it your actual interests, search for a few things like Golf, Cars, etc.

Threads: Select the three dots on posts and choose “Hide”. Same as Instagram, search for a few generic topics you prefer.

Massively better results as soon as the next day.

I want threads to work so badly compared to Twitter that I’ve happily just written a guide to train Metas algorithm. That’s how badly Twitter has dropped the ball.

Same here. The algorithm seems to be really bad at recommending relevant content on the 'for you' style timeline, and barely seems to take my likes and follows into account at all...

You mean, Twitter.

I had the opposite experience. I never had this problem either, until all the firings happened.

After that, either someone wasn't looking after the thirst traps, or they actively changed the throttle of them so they kept appearing.

That was about a month before I left that cess pit.

I didn’t notice any difference until the last month or so, and now it’s not ordinary users posting thirst traps, but obvious bots “looking for love” liking and retweeting my posts seconds after I post them. It’s a different problem than Instagram, but it’s still pretty bizarre considering Musk’s complaints that pre-acquisition Twitter had too many bots.

Facebook is flooded with these as well. They have gotten really good at making the profiles look organic.

This sounds all true, but on Twitter - I never had the issue before so it seems more than a coincedence.

In fact, I used to be very surprised to read that Twitter had been previously widely used for porn adverts. I was kind of deluded into not even thinking about it. But scratch the surface and it was there. But it never appeared in my daily use.

Prior to the takeover I had been oblivious to it. After the takeover, the surface was scratched and what had previously been "underground" really made itself known in my twitter feed.

That isn't what made me leave the platform, but just my observation at the time.

Are you complaining? Edit /s

> They are just trying to avoid the platform turning into the polarising mess that Twitter is right now.

What if that is the actual state of the country and Twitter is just reflecting it?

The real world is a lot saner, and beautiful

I am more and more convinced that the Internet is a net negative for discourse and human socialisation, and no one is really exploring this possibility. We are all trying to make the social media experiment work and I am horrified by its result. The more we tweak and add to it (upvotes, user moderators, likes, retweets, the Algorithm), the worse it gets.

We're so used to the fast pace of modern science that we forget cultural evolution sometimes takes hundreds of years. What if we are 500 years before enough Internet philosophers have taught us how to behave online?

> I am more and more convinced that the Internet is a net negative for discourse and human socialisation, and no one is really exploring this possibility.

A huge amount has been written and spoken about this.

Apparently, not enough, or not forceful enough for a contingent of people to decide to quit the Internet for good. Where are the modern day anti-Internet luddites? Talking about it on a blog or, worse, posting about it on Twitter doesn't count, sorry.

> Where are the modern day anti-Internet luddites?

They probably don't use the Internet.

Exactly.

You know how much I post about how I don't use Facebook on Facebook? Zero.

You know how many people who don't use Facebook someone on Facebook would believe exist? Zero.

If you really want to find people who don't do a thing... go find them.

As a starting place, Wyoming has whole swaths of folks who don't use email.

So that's the rub, the people who realize it is horrible actually quit on it. Lots of people talk about getting of social media, but very few actually delete all of their accounts. I've removed every social account I have around four years ago. I still have a HN account, but that's about it. I talk to my family and friends about how dangerous I think social media is to our society if the topic comes up, but frankly not many people want to hear it. If I really pressed, I'd end up being "that guy" who talks too much about any topic.

I really don't think the majority of folks are going to quit social media even if every day the NYTimes, CNN, Fox News, whoever put out news stories on how horrendous it is.

My compromise is I have Facebook and Twitter accounts, but not the apps, so I have to use a browser on my phone to look at them. This means I can still see content, but no notifications and the friction is high. I'd rather go on Youtube and see what people I subscribe to are making videos about.

The Internet as a infrastructure, I think it's probably a huge net positive. Social networks on the other hand, particularly Twitter and Facebook, I would agree we would be better off without them right now.

The problem Twitter and Facebook have is size. Call it an unproven conjecture, but any network that reaches quasi-global sizes becomes a cesspool of scum and villainy, and it scales exponentially with number of users. Newer generations are discovering that niche, small communities are better, in the face of the idea of an Inter-Net.

While I enjoy HN immensely and have been participating without major issues for a decade, it would be hard for me to say even this place is the gold standard of communication. The upvote system, for example, is the major contributor to echo chamber hive mind mob thinking.

Well it's not just scale. It's also a series of business decisions that hurt civility in various ways:

1. Focus on engagement means a focus on rage inducing, soundbite esque content that provokes anger rather than a reasonable conversation.

2. Algorithmic timelines mean content is often personalised to the user, potentially either leading to an echo chamber or a fight (by showing content from people the user fundamentally disagrees with)

3. Moderation is virtually nonexistent, outsourced to third world support teams or applied unevenly/unfairly, both encouraging bad behaviour and making those affected think the system is against them.

4. Short character limits and mobile focused designs encourage snarky responses and short putdowns over more thoughtful responses.

5. The focus on reply times and posting speed in how comments are shown encourages responding based on the title alone (on sites like Reddit especially)

6. Upvote/downvote system encourages people to see content as good or bad and nothing else, with the definitions of such being heavily based on whether the content agrees with their personal biases.

And many, many other factors. Most social media sites and services are designed to make people act as unreasonably as possible.

Social networks as a concept are also a huge net positive, in my view. Corporate leeches trying to monetize everything about human interaction, we're better off without. Which does include Facebook and increasingly includes Xitter.

I disagree. While corporate interests make social networks worse, regular people are tend to be major asshats on any social network, a concept that was already known in the late 90s and today it is widespread, and crosses any cultural, economical and contextual reason. It is safe to say humans on the internet eventually behave like asshats.

The real difference between social media and real life is that you can get punched in the face for being an asshat, and in general we have a lot of brain power dedicated to making sure we fit into our tribal group and physical context.

Mind you, I did not say the Internet is an absolute negative, but in my view, the enormous benefit of instantaneous communication is negated by the impossibility of measured discourse with more than two dozen strangers.

>you can get punched in the face for being an asshat So you believe this is right, then? I think that's literally the biggest problem with our species; it all comes down to violence, in the end.

Doesn't matter how much we've progressed society, women's rights, gay right's etc - apparently the rule of law is still "yeah, well, I can punch you in the face!" and so long as the puncher fits into societal norms, everyone will clap and cheer!

Damn we really do just form layers upon layers of tribes, and boy do we still have a lust for tribal warfare.

Ugh.. this is exactly the problem. There are nuances to my argument that your knee jerk reaction just conveniently ignores, and claims that I want violence for any degree of disagreement. "And everybody will clap and cheer!" Seriously?

This is why people cannot have intelligent discourse on the Internet. Instead of giving me the benefit of the doubt and space to elaborate my case, you point to me and say "look at this troglodyte, everybody," and find a way to use the causes and ideologies you believe in (women and gay rights, which have nothing to do with my argument) as a weapon to demonize me and my words.

If you do not see that as terrifying and anti-intellectual, you have been spending too much time on the Internet, because I truly believe that if we were sat in front of each other we would find we are of the same general opinion and would enjoy a pleasant conversation.

Honestly, this is quite tiring, so I have no interest in engaging further. You won. Have a good day.

With the length of your response, you could have actually elaborated your point further, perhaps without the drama (or with it, both is still good. Real emotion is the spicy magic that separates us from LLMs).

It was a pretty settled point two decades ago.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

There was maybe a lull during the early-Facebook era, as more grandparents adopted the platform while retaining their manners and social decency.

And then they too realized they could post whatever they wanted about "The {Noun}s" without consequence.

And now we're here again.

There's a lot to be said for talking to someone's face and having to deal with the consequences of your words directly.

The gig reddits are heaped full of people trying to divine the algorithms.

Culture learns by experience.

Capitol cops might disagree... This country has had a recent armed insurrection and people convicted of seditious conspiracy. Meanwhile the people who organized it see themselves as the victims of weaponized law enforcement and call for violence against law enforcement institutions such as judges, attorney generals, etc. It's not the entire real world, but you've got to admit it isn't just a Twitter bubble that's crazy polarized.

Yeah, a bunch of poor ignorant rednecks invading the capitol was almost an armed insurrection that almost took the power in the most powerful police state of the world.

Have people that believe this stupid bullshit ever thought more than a couple of seconds about it? What are those folks going to do later? Invade the pentagon?

Yes, the USA has become a laughable banana republic with almost Soviet amounts of propaganda. But insurrections don’t work like that. Can’t you fucking see the propaganda?

Had they destroyed the ballots, had they killed Pence, we would have been in uncharted legal and constitutional territory.

It wasn’t the insurgents who would have taken control of the government. It was the man driving them to destruction who would have taken advantage of the chaos to stay in power.

Just because the insurrection could have been crushed at any moment doesn’t change what it was.

>But insurrections don’t work like that

The capitol riot thing was a stalling tactic. The ones trying to take over the government were NOT the people pooping on Nancy Pelosi's desk. We have their notes, talking about how they we submitting false electors. We know Pence called up a friend to ask whether he could come up with a legal theory to justify the process. He only didn't go through with it because he thought the plotters would kill him. A significant portion of the Republican party STILL voted to not confirm Biden as president after it happened.

Yeah we would've just replaced all the dead senators with football players and been fine

Our bubbles are like that. The real world is a real damn mess.

I'd wager it's still better than the cyber world

You don't go outside too much, don't you?

The real world might be tragic, violent, or worse. But, inhumane conduct on the "metaverse" is much more normalized and common than in the relative considerate society I live in. I understand the bias here. It might be reason behind this comment. Nevertheless, it's real.

And what if Twitter is partly causing it (along with other media).

You can also go the other way. There's always going to be the possibility of a chicken/egg type question, but it seems clear that a lot of the insanity and division started to happen about the time people started trying to control (and started caring so much about) what other people say and think. It just feels like there was this sudden flip of a switch where suddenly there was this idea that if you control 'the message', you can control what people think, and a certain group of people vigorously pursued this.

It's not hard to see how this is going to drive people into deeply divided groups. You immediately end up with an in-group and an out-group, both with good reason to avoid the other. And then in this division, both groups characterization of the other drifts further and further from reality, further cementing such divisions. This site [1] demonstrating the scale of the perception gap among various groups is quite telling. I don't think it was like this, at all, not that long ago.

[1] - https://perceptiongap.us/

> It just feels like there was this sudden flip of a switch where suddenly there was this idea that if you control 'the message', you can control what people think, and a certain group of people vigorously pursued this.

I locate this moment quite precisely. It was when either Richard Perle or Donald Rumsfeld responded to a journalist's live TV question about 'the reality' in Iraq II, and said "We control reality". That was when narrative paradigm took a dark turn in the West and I see the PNAC as taking internal psyops to a whole new, overt level.

All politicians _know_ this, but you never _say it_ !!

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle and company publicly burned the precious veneer of good faith.

They didn't just want to construct the Iraq War, they needed to rub our noses in the blatant cheek of it.

That was the birth of "post truth" for me.

After that it naturally followed that every organisation, business, or individual could legitimately construct their own "narrative reality" through social media or whatever, without any regard for facts.

On the other hand, people seem to listen to what they like to hear. 'T digs coal' and 'climate change is mostly a hoax', 'we are going to replace <disgrace> with _something much better_'. I don't believe a majority believed it but they acted differently. So my tentative conclusion would be, the public is the problem. Which is sadly even worse than 'platform X is the problem'.

An argument against this is that this is nothing new, yet the new radical divisions are. It happened both relatively recently, and extremely rapidly. If you described the state of society today to an American 25 years ago, I think exactly 100% would think you were borderline out of your mind, because it's all been just such an irrational and illogical trajectory from where we were headed.

If you look at the big divide in the past, slavery, it was on a scale many orders of magnitude worse than anything we could debate on modern times, yet it still took society just under a century to completely collapse over it. And it's not like society was more impassive. In the midst of that century you had things like a vice president killing a Founding Father in a duel, over political disagreements.

I believe you are referring to the N/S civil war? What do you mean about the collapse 100 year thereafter?

Slavery was highly contentious, at all levels, from day 0 of the United States. That's where Thomas Jefferson's "All men are created equal." line came from. In the original draft of the Declaration, he included a lengthy diatribe against slavery, but it was removed in the final draft - presumably under pressure from slave interests. That conflict, over such a meaningful issue, still took near to 100 years to collapse into the Civil War.

Back to modern times, I don't think it's hyperbolic to see secessionary momentum following the election next year, regardless of who wins, as an at least reasonably possible scenario. And if it does, then we're 9/10ths of the way there. And it's not even entirely clear what happened. It's just like things divided hard in an incredibly brief period of time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

It's both, in a feedback loop from hell.

>> They are interested in breaking news, sports etc. They are just trying to avoid the platform turning into the polarising mess that Twitter is right now.

They're right to do this too. I enjoyed Threads drama free for a few days. The first time I saw a post from a journalist - it was drama. Complaining about how important news is and how it's morally wrong of Meta to not be prioritising it. So obviously self-serving too.

The irony, people whine when shown rage bait, people whine when not shown rage bait.

They want to avoid recreating the polarising mess that is Twitter... by copying Twitter wholesale?

I don't think people at Meta think that "polarizing" is bad, is an easy way to drive engagement

It’s at least a plausible market opportunity—a way to differentiate themselves from Twitter and capitalize on the people who are repulsed by Twitter’s rage peddling (although the rage peddling cooled down a bit post-acquisition, especially with Community Notes, but platform culture doesn’t change overnight even if the algos and features improve slightly).

I think polarization is something that changes between societies, I now live in a society that is polarized by the politicians themselves and for sure you see a lot of interactions in posts about politics.

Threads is dead at this point realistically

Not according to Zuckerberg [1]. He was happy with DAU numbers and planned to commit to the app long-term.

Threads is contributing a huge amount of behavioural data to Instagram ad profiles so it may never need to run ads in order to provide significant value to the company. That's going to place X at a disadvantage over the long term.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/23889057/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-el...

But this is standard CEO-speak. He will remain completely happy with the app, committed to it going forward, and a personal power-user of it. Right up until the moment it's abandoned completely with no warning.

Instagram is also embedding Threads posts directly, with a link to open them in the app. I've gotten a few prompts while using Instagram to remind me to open Threads.

However, every time I open the app it's basically a ghost town. I personally don't know anyone using it, so I just see a bunch of brand and celebrity posts.

Threads feels more like a platform for brands than for regular people.

Almost everyone I know is using Bluesky now. I’ve yet to see anyone using threads.

Must be nice to live in a bubble where Bluesky isn't gated behind a waitlist and your entire circle can move wholesale with ease.

Waitlist is a distraction. Ask for a code from core("terminally online") Twitter users. I got mine on Nostr from someone not a furry. Perhaps you can ask around in the Fediverse.

I've never seen a anything from Bsky cross-posted on Twitter, IG, or Reddit. I don't think it's just people like me that won't want to hunt for an invite to something I can't even preview.

It's... Twitter pre-firehose at this moment. Lunch pics and random ideas, not an endless buzz stream. So not much to crosspost out.

Access to invite codes is abundant in the furry community. Can just ask anyone you know for one.

Network effects. Do you think Facebook would have ever taken off back in the 2000s if everyone had to get a code from a furry to join?

From memory Facebook was gatekept behind needing to be a university student.

From 2004-2007. It's been a public square for the vast majority of its existence.

Not sure where this optimism comes from, but alright.

Because this is Meta we are talking about. They know how to build social networks.

And they have the cash to keep Threads going for decades whereas X is in a financial hole. Linda is meeting with creditors [1] who are freaking out over the drop in valuation and she doesn't even know whether the company plans to be advertising or subscription driven.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/474b30e9-a726-4571-8475-9adabbbc8...

> Because this is Meta we are talking about. They know how to build social networks.

Meta, the company currently named after their attempted pivot to a VR social network that utterly bombed? I'll certainly grant that they built one social network, but it is less obvious to me that they can repeat it on command.

> Because this is Meta we are talking about. They know how to build social networks.

Not really. Zuckerburg got lucky once, the rest was purchased.

You have to have a talent for that though. How many companies have made terrible purchases?

Like him or hate him, Zuckerberg’s strategies have been great for his company. I don’t know about his VR business, but he’s like a Midas king when it comes to social media. Everything social media related he’s touched has turned into gold. Instagram and WhatsApp were already kind of big, but they’re were not the ubiquitous behemoths they are today.

Threads could be his first big fail though.

Beware survivor bias. How many acquisitions has Facebook/Meta made? (answer: a lot). How many are social behemoths? (answer: 2). We don't know how many he tried to make successful and failed at, because we don't hear of them, or don't remember them.

The whole Oculus mess does seem to indicate he doesn't have a Midas touch. And let's not forget the metaverse, which isn't going at all well.

They have 5 successful social platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Workplace, Threads.

The latter has reached 130m+ users after all.

Never heard of Workplace before (unless that's the metaverse thing, in which case it's clearly not successful). And "threads is successful" is dubious: the key point of the article is that it isn't.

Workplace is private Facebook for large orgs. So just Facebook. Doesn't seem like a total flop, though.

I'd rather think that Facebook had been consistently successful in catering its cohort. That targeted cohort might just have too little overlap with users in market for Twitter/Mastodon/Threads, but as far as Facebook/Instagram(post-acquisition) are concerned the users seem satisfied with Meta-run social media to me.

Large orgs aren't using FB enterprise offering, they're on Teams or Slack.

Workplace is the market leading enterprise social network.

And if building a hundred million user social network in such a rapid timeframe isn't a success not sure what is.

yeah, exactly. We're not sure this is success.

>the rest was purchased

Instagram had 30 million users at the time of acquisition. Scaling that to billions of users is not trivial nor is it inevitable.

WhatsApp, another Meta purchase, begs to differ.

also it might be enough now if they dominate some small niches at start and grow from there. Instagram started with mood pictures about coffee, tiktok was first about dancing videos etc. Zuckberg knows actual numbers and we don't.

According to Zuck their "metaverse" is not dead neither, but I guess it's filled of legless people wandering around aimlessly

> news is not a priority for them

Huh? That's a strange requirement. Somehow every social media platform eventually devolves into having news, meme pages and other faceless inhuman entities you seemingly can't escape.

I, for one, desperately want the opposite — a platform where organizations of any kind are not welcome. Only people and their personal accounts. The fediverse is kinda like that. Yes, BBC does have their own Mastodon server, but they don't have many followers and there are no algorithms to force-feed you out-of-network content.

Mastodon is quite different. It really filters a lot of noise away (e.g. Xwitter always has ~20 pointless meme gif comments below every viral post) and it self-selects what I would consider interesting people. The algorithm-centred platforms tend to congregate around celebrities/influencers over time, while Mastodon is much more egalitarian and people-focused.

With some amount of curation, sure. I’ve recently started getting into mastodon and all I’ve seen across the dozens of sites are way more related to current political events than anything else.

I recommend installing the extension Streetpass for Mastodon to build up your followed accounts organically across time. A surprising number of interesting articles submitted to HN link back to the author's Mastodon account.

(Graze for Mastodon is another useful extension)

First off, thank you.

Secondly, it feels like in a federate network of any type that growing the network should be top priority, even over the user experience.

Put another way, it seems to me as a newbie that Mastodon's growth effort itself has been federated, which is probably not ideal for the growth necessary to really challenge the walled gardens.

I happen to think Mastodon is good enough as it is. To me it doesn't really need faster growth. It won me over and it won over the hundreds of people I'm following. I get a lot of value from it that I never got on Twitter, despite Mastodon's flaws.

The service itself is improving slowly and quite conservatively which is a really nice change of pace from the warp speed enshittification I have been used to for years now. On the other hand, there is also a wide range of high-quality third apps for it which Twitter now completely lacks (and basically every other walled garden platform, e.g. Reddit was the latest casualty) of you need a different experience.

> a platform where organizations of any kind are not welcome. Only people and their personal accounts

So, politicians and political meme accounts?

How would you even know if a personal account wasn't being managed by an organization?

You can't block politics on these sites in any case. People love drama, it adds 'stickiness' to the app.

> So, politicians and political meme accounts?

Without any form of recommendation system, you will have to find and follow these accounts yourself. Most people wouldn't do that without being constantly nudged by algorithms. So, anything you'll see in your feed would come from people you intentionally follow intentionally reposting things. For a piece of content created by someone way outside of your bubble to become viral in this kind of setup, it has to be really damn good.

News is not as monetizable as something short-form such as Reels

I feel like the problem with Threads is the direct integrations with Instagram.

There's so many self-indulgent posts from IG influencers earlier on it becomes terrible experience to doom scroll. By the time they released a separate "Following" tab, people have lost their interest in using it.

My Threads has turned into an instagram copy. Half the posts are pictures, which, is neat. But I prefer the instagram interface.

And as usual Meta doesn't give a f about iPads, so threads (like instagram) looks like crap running on it.

Hypocritical of Zuck now show news after having a major snit fit when here in Canada he was asked to support news organizations he chose not to and just block news.

> he was asked to support news organizations

I think that's a pretty disingenuous way of putting it. Meta and Google were told that by law they would need to pay money to /link/ to news content. Everyone else pays Meta and Google to run ads or does SEO, and now Meta has to pay the people they're linking to (but only if its news). It's completely back-asswords and I support their protest.

"Hey McDonalds, when this one group orders a cheeseburger you have to give them money instead of them paying you"

"Okay, we won't serve those people cheeseburgers."

Same situation, just as ridiculous.

> What makes this news more interesting is the fact that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has abandoned its Threads account but is still maintaining its self-hosted Mastodon accounts online.

The title made it sound like BBC have picked a side, but the reality could be that they still got a few more months left in their experiment with Mastodon. Maybe it's still too early to tell anything concrete at this time.

Definitely. BBC News Labs has a drawer full of “Completed” projects as seen at https://bbcnewslabs.co.uk/projects/

News Labs isn't running the Mastodon trial, it's a different team in BBC R&D with a different remit

threads supposedly intends to eventually federate with activitypub, so it's entirely possible the bbc is just betting on the one with the more active users, assuming eventually threads will pull in their feeds anyway.

I highly doubt BBC's social media managers are making long term bets on smaller social media networks eventually investing in activitypub. IRL they probably got little engagement vs the time they were investing so decided to just keep at least one Twitter style feed around so they don't completely abandon the concept of "microblogging"... as the vast, vast bulk of the journalism industry continues to use Twitter and that idea isn't dying any time soon. Having a backup comms platform is deemed valuable enough even if it doesn't drive high business value.

Edit: others have pointed out they still use X so I guess the whole point is moot

At the scale of BBC's social media managers I hope they are not on the x.com website typing in updates and clicking post.

They should be using custom software and be able to redirect / duplicate the distribution of their news to different or multiple outlets with little more effort than a few lines of code.

>I hope they are not on the x.com website typing in updates and clicking post.

Is there any form of API access exposed to third parties anymore on notTwitter?

I think that recent history clearly shows, that any larger organization and especially any public organization should at minimum also have a Mastodon representation. One can argue a lot on how a certain social network is superior to Mastodon. And often enough, that is indeed true. But all social networks that are run by a single entity are at the mercy of that entity. They might completely change their policies at a whim.

With Mastodon though, you can run your own instance. No one can take that from you and you can guarantee that your content is reachable for anyone interested. That should be reason enough to support it, even if you also have a presence on other networks.

In a sense, this reminds me of the old competition between the web and more centralized services like bulletin boards. The web is not as integrated, but its winning power was, that everyone can set up a web page, you are not dependent on any organization to do so, which could prevent you doing it.

I do fully agree that there are philosophical and ethical problems with TwitterX, and I would like to see it fail however the rumors of the demise of Twitter / X are exaggerated.

It is a massive and difficult job to pull regular users away from what they are comfortable with X / Twitter to a completely new platform without any real end user benefit. In fact, it lacks a lot of features users may like on TwitterX

I think Twitter/X charging money might be what kills it off. If you need to pay to post/view anything, then about 95% of the population will say "sod this, I'm out of here".

I'll be very surprised if Musk actually does go through with that promise/idea (even someone like this knows how network effects work, right?), but if he does, I'd say that would be the tipping point.

As somebody with only second-hand exposure to Twitter, it feels like they're actively driving it to irrelevance. All I hear for a year now is that they turn off interfaces that enabled people to integrate with them.

Just last week a customer called because the Twitter embed on their site didn't work anymore. When we said we'd investigate, they said not to bother and just replace it with a link.

As somebody who’s been on Twitter since 2008, you couldn’t be more wrong. The site has never felt more alive, anyone vaguely tangential to TPOT or other Twitter subcultures could tell you the same. The difference now is that more of the conversation is happening amongst actual users and less so amongst corporations as I assume is the case for your client.

Personally, I’m totally happy if Burger King and Tom’s Plumbing leave Twitter and head to Mastodon, they weren’t the ones making it a good platform in the first place.

The client is a scientific institution. I wanted to check whether they are tweeting at all anymore. But it doesn't show their tweets without me registering. Shrug.

What is TPOT?

"i think xyz would be what finally kills twitter" "this time bro, just trust me. it wouldn't go like the 1000 other times i predicted twitter would get killed"

I get the skepticism, but I've never seen people pay for a social media site en masse. If Twitter/X changes that I'll be very surprised (and probably disappointed in humanity's unwillingness to let go of the past).

> I think Twitter/X charging money might be what kills it off.

I don't think this is true at all. Where did you get this idea they'd charge money for reading and posting?

https://www.axios.com/2023/09/19/musk-x-twitter-charge-all-u...

And a video where Musk states it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sea-Uxw5Syg

..."because a bot costs a fraction of a penny call it a tenth of a penny, but if somebody even has to pay a few dollars, some minor amount, the effective cost of bots is very high. And then you also have to get a new payment method every time you have a new bot".

I understand where Musk is coming from, but that's crazy.

I think if X charges even a dollar a year, it'll lose 95%+ of its customer base. Unless, of course, X has some serious value proposition in the future. I don't see much right now.

> "I do fully agree that there are philosophical and ethical problems with TwitterX, and I would like to see it fail..."

Agree with who? The article mentions nothing of the sort. It seems you have your own philosophical and ethical problems. Agreeing with ghosts, and wishing failure on others.

Now I'm curious to know know what you think the philiosphical and ethical problems with X are.

Supporting Musk just to view tweets (or whatever they are called) is a big moral compromise imho.

I get that if you are a news or social media source you need the views so it's work with him or lose money but that's not the case for many other people.

I left months ago and think it was the right decision for many reasons.

Probably that owner is a Billionaire online bully with a large following of acolytes ready to brigade anyone he feels like.

And that Twitter/X has now been login-walled so anyone that wants more than an embedded Tweet link has to make an account. Which means organisations like the BBC which use it are now implicitly supporting Musk.

I'm not sure you used Twitter much before he bought it, at that point was full of village mobs roaming and brigading anyone they felt like. To be honest that's actually calmed down since it's changed, they've probably all left to their very own echo-chamber mastodon instances.

I only ever see 'your side' constantly grind on about the politics of an artist, athlete, or business owner, in discussions completely unrelated to said politics, in an attempt to censor, cancel or otherwise leg-pull. To me, it's pretty clear who the bullies are.

Being a platform.

Of course that's not new : Twitter's APIpocalypse that spawned Mastodon happened in 2013...

I get an involuntary shudder of PTSD at seeing “Threads” and “BBC” in the same sentence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads_(1984_film)

Because of this?

As someone born after the Cold War, that film opened my eyes to the fear of nuclear winter in a way I didn't grasp learning history. Fantastic piece of cinema, highly recommended.

Because of that!

For me it was When the Wind Blows[1].

A cutesy animated cartoon film about an old couple dieting the affects of nuclear fallout ...things were different in the 80s.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_the_Wind_Blows_(1986_film...

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lEhcCvuLys

I'm there with you man.

Every time this comes up I point out that Cold War, and specifically Threads related PTSD, is a very real thing for UK Gen X!

Equating watching a scary drama in 1984 with something as severe as PTSD and saying it's a very real thing for an entire generation is over the top. Baby boomers, sure they dealt with the cold war pretty realistically.

UK-born Gen X here. We entirely expected to be nuked before we were 40. If millenials can have PTSD from climate change [0], then we had PTSD from the cold war.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/20/climate-...

Whether or not it counts as PTSD, I remember it being a stressful time, causing worry that has persisted through to the present. There were the films, of course; When the Wind Blows and The Day After are films I watched (the former was also available as a graphic novel IIRC). I'm not sure about Threads, but I definitely saw The War Game (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_Game). The scene with firemen trying to put out a firestorm and being suffocated has stuck in my head. The Protect and Survive booklet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_Survive) was around to instruct families in how to construct temporary makeshift shelters against nuclear blast. I recall such planning, including watching a film explaining how long the various Protect and Survive shelters might last at different distances from a blast ("The occupants of this shelter will be fine, for 6 seconds until the blast wave hits..." etc. etc). Military training at school (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Cadet_Force) also involved, from time to time, lectures from liaison officers who would remind us of the odds against us in terms of land forces, and how long we might hold out before things went nuclear (should the Warsaw Pact have attacked NATO).

this post gave me PTSD

They can't have PTSD from climate change.

Unless you want PTSD to just mean "uncomfort". In which case, everyone has PTSD. But then what does disorder mean if it's normal?

I agree, but apparently PTSD from climate change is a thing.

Doesn't the P in PTSD require climate change to be over before it can be classified as such? Shouldn't it be called Ongoing or Anticipatory rather than Post?

true. Is the danger from nukes done now?

Lots of fake ideas are "things".

Seems weird to play semantics with what is, as I understand it, a collection of symptoms.

You wouldn’t gotcha the flu because it’s not actually caused by the stars’ influence, would you?

I dunno. Try watching it. It’s one of the few movies I’ve seen that I’d call literally “life changing” and certainly convinced me that nuclear war is the most immoral act our species is (currently) capable of undertaking.

I can relate to this a little. I had a similar experience (maybe not quite as strong, but still) when I first read On the Beach by Nevil Shute

I first read that back in high school and it is legitimately one of my favorite books - I re-read it every few years.

I think in my area it was pretty broadly assigned reading at the time - lots of other high schools in the US assigned it - though no idea if that’s still the case (the book certainly isn’t perfect - the female characters are incredibly one-dimensional) but I hope it is still commonly read.

I see On the Beach as being Threads-Lite. On the Beach is certainly upsetting but wow, does Threads show a more upsetting version of similar dynamics. Plus none of the characters of Threads are as uncomplicatedly virtuous as the characters of On the Beach.

I've seen it. I've also seen some scary movies that make me scared of the dark, but that's not PTSD.

PTSD is a spectrum :-)

As all disorders are.

I can remember being in bed and hearing jets flying overhead and literally being terrified I was about to be nuked.

These weren’t commercial airliners.

I lived on the coast in the UK. It was airforce jets and it happened often enough for me to remember it.

To this day I could not watch threads.

The post Thatcher / Reagan / Gorbachev and Berlin Wall era in the 90s had a culture born out of Cold War trauma.

Everything is a spectrum, but you either class it as X or you don't. This is not X.

You don't have PTSD, you had a rational fear of something.

Take a trip to any at war country and you still may fear planes overhead. But it won't give you PTSD.

It's on the Internet Archive if you want to see for yourself: https://archive.org/details/threads_202007

Not quite "boomer" but vividly recall air alert sirens being played for evacuation exercises to seek shelters in Norway when I was a child of I guess 6 or 7 in the late 70s.

"Better dead than red." That's another one I vividly remember circulating, a bit later (early 80s).

The threat of nuclear war was very real. I guess we got lucky in the end.

Yeah, one of the houses in it is just round the corner from us in Sheffield.

Given that Threads seems to suppress posts linking to other websites, and the audience there isn't particularly interested in news, I'm not surprised the BBC has given up on it. The fact the algorithm recommends you everything but what you're interested in and engagement is questionable even for larger accounts is just the icing on the cake.

But I'm honestly not sure any of these alternative platforms is going to replace Twitter for news anytime soon. BlueSky feels a lot like Threads activity wise; decent to mediocre engagement for popular accounts and barely any for regular folks/new users, and Mastodon has high engagement, but a far more technical, niche audience.

And neither really care much more about news than Threads does. Probably because of all the toxicity that news posts tend to bring over on Twitter/X, and these services acting as an escape from that...

  Given that Threads seems to suppress posts linking to other websites,

Source? I know X was introducing delays on links to threads, blue sky, and mastodon; is that what you meant?

I think the commenter was claiming that Threads does not show posts with links in people's feeds as often as it shows other posts.

So I've been searching for a few minutes on threads and duckduckgo, but I can't find mention of this anywhere. Keeping people from clicking through to another site is a dark pattern - accepted maybe, but not cool. This is the first I've heard about it, so I am not convinced yet. I wonder.

This seems also intended to be read as the BBC deprecating its presence on X, which alternative-universe situation is implied by the wording of the title and anti-X stance of the writer generally; obviously that's not the case, however much it might be wished here.

X is not mentioned in the title and the very first sentence of the article says that the BBC accounts are still on X/Twitter. What gives you the impression that the intention was for this to be read as the contrary?

I absolutely read the title as the BBC choosing a single platform. If not why wouldn’t it say “BBC gives up on Threads, sticks with Mastodon and X”?

I think it could much more fairly be read as "...out of alternate sources for real-time short-form communication, BBC has given up on Threads, but is sticking with Mastodon".

Twitter/X is the 'default' and the assumption that media will be on it...while Threads and Mastodon are the _alternatives_. This article, to me, is just suggesting that BBC has dropped _one of the alternatives_.

Wouldn't it then say "BBC gives up on Threads and X, sticks with Mastodon"?

Maybe they haven't memorized which platforms the BBC is currently on and assume it was never on X.

Not if they gave up on X months ago.

Because "X is not mentioned in the title" and the "anti-X stance of the writer generally".

How could you possibly know the stance of the writer generally without even having read the first sentence?

I read the entire article, including the dismissal of X, the implied misleading message discussed, and the links at the bottom to the authors missives which have practically every platform except X.

Less of the bumptious tone please.

They MAY have an X bias, but I think a much more generous interpretation is simply that they are highlighting which _alternative_ platforms BBC have given up on.

Threads and Mastodon are both _alternative_ choices, with Twitter being the main real-time shortform source. TFA highlights that BBC is giving up on threads, but not on alternatives in general.

Possibly because they are familiar with the writer

Hold on, _not mentioning Twitter in the title_ implies that they're abandoning Twitter? How do you figure that? The title also doesn't mention chairs or toilets, but one assumes the BBC will still be using those.

s/X/Tesla/g

The BBC is very much active on X, such as https://twitter.com/BBCWorld

The BBC is also actively using more of their accounts on X with the last time they posted is less than an hour ago on https://twitter.com/BBCSport, https://twitter.com/BBCWorld and https://twitter.com/BBCBreaking.

On threads their last post on BBC Sports was 12 hours ago: https://www.threads.net/@bbcsport

So in fact, they are more active on Twitter / X than on the rest of the social networks.

But surely that somehow means 'X is dying' /s

Why is this being downvoted? TFA is literally lying. Since the article has been posted, they have posted more to Twitter than to either of Threads or Mastodon. This is like the fluffers who set a mastodon URL in their Twitter profile to threaten Twitter but have never even considered actually posting to Mastodon.

Soon: BBC gives up on Mastodon, sticks with BlueSky. And my remark will still be as valid: they will have posted more on Twitter than on Threads, Mastodon, or BlueSky. It's just ridiculous games at this point.

If you wanted any more proof of the network effect and how much you can ruin an Internet service* and still keep all of its users captive, look no further.

(*Twitter literally shows the replies out of order for me right now. It is a technical disaster and yet my government still uses it almost exclusively.)

Can you see many replies by the BBC? Genuine question, I just get a Twitter frontend error when I open the replies tab. (In Musk's defense, I got this sort of error frequently pre-acquisition).

If it's mostly top-level posts that could just be the same script pumping out content on all their platforms.

Last time I checked Threads was still not available in Europe so that'd be another curtailment.

Isn't threads what appeared as channels notifications in whatsapp anyway? I haven't tested subscribing to any account but I totally have that.

EU has already read the riot act to X on disinformation.

So we could see Threads approved at the same time X is banned.

No one banned Threads in the EU.

The way Threads is implemented and is working is illegal in the EU, so Meta decided not to launch it in the EU until they figure out how to circumvent the laws.

I think the history of that is that Meta at the last minute decided that they couldn't launch Threads in the EU and that that sealed the faith of Threads leading to its now increasingly obvious failure in the market. It looks like a poorly planned and executed rush job by Meta that is now failing.

The reason the BBC is ditching Threads is because it has no traction worth talking about and because they are a European company and a European launch of Threads seems to be not happening. Mastodon is apparently good enough that they are not giving up on that one for now. Probably also really cheap for them to support it as they can self-host it. And given how critical they are of Musk, they need an alternative to X even if they still have to use it.

They just should provide login with own mail

It's more than that: Meta is also in hot water because of handling of user data, behavior advertising, and using data from its seemingly separate apps across Facebook for tracking and advertising.

Threads runs afoul of many provisions in Digital Markets Act and possibly GDPR, too.

I'm not terribly familiar with these ecosystems, but for a news broadcaster it seems like a massive advantage that Mastodon is highly accessible to a non-logged-in user.

Unfortunately, BBC doesn't seem to have world news on their own mastodon instance.

Without that, I don't think they're going to get worthwhile numbers from mastodon...

I imagine it is only a matter of time before they do have a world news account. Meanwhile, there are plenty of mirror accounts (rss posters) of their headlines on Mastodon.

And summarisers like https://mastodon.bot/@bbcnews

Why haven't they at least taken the twitter feeds and cross posted? Or spit the beeb rss feed out via mastodon?

The "experiment" seems to be little more than spinning up a server.

I can't stand that Instagram doesn't let you copy and paste (or save) content out of it, and I also can't stand when Threads also doesn't let you do the same thing. In the Threads app, you literally can't just select the text of a thread to paste elsewhere. To hell with that.

I don't know what you're using, but modern Android will let you copy text and images out of basically anything from the "Select" button on the bottom of the app switcher

If you don't happen to have that on your Android phone, Copy [1] works well.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.weberdo.ap...

iOS. I guess that explains it. Apple apparently lets app devs cancel text selection

On iOS at least you can copy text from Threads. Just long press and select Copy.

Tried that, couldn't get it to work, weird

And the lack of direct url access or video control, drives me up the wall.

You will have a really hard time finding a person outside tech circles who knows of, much less actively uses, Threads or Mastodon.

I've see authors, actors, scientists, artists, musicians, journalists and people of all stripes (and not all from "tech circles") on Mastodon.

Ironically, most complaining I've seen about the technical hurdles of joining Mastodon have come from techies on HN. Meanwhile Stephen King, a nearly 80 year old author who probably still uses a rotary phone and manual typewriter, managed to figure it out.

Or more likely find someone to figure it out for him but still.

Some content producers/personalities are certainly using these services, but the content consumers aren't common outside the tech circles.

Agreed. I've never been on Mastodon, because there is no reason for me to bother (I did hear about it). Threads? I DID hear about it and I'm actively refusing, because if I need Threads account, it's bound to my Instagram account and if I don't like it and resign my IG is gone. Meh, no need for that.

But same applies with Discord for me. Why would I be there? Why companies expect me to contact them via Discord? Yo, gimme wiki, or answer email. I don't need some chat-thingy/Slack/Discord.

Edit: Why don't we have email, nntp and IRC anymore? Just build stuff on it, don't reinvent.

Think I've come across two links to mastodon in my life (probably here on HN), and have never encountered threads (I do live in Europe).

> (ironically, most of them are still using X, formally known as Twitter).

Dunno, feels like the only people leaving X was the people who didn't use X anyway..

I've been using it with the same frequency as before Musik took over, and to be honest, I've not noticed anything different in the stuff I see/find/interact.

I was a pretty heavy Twitter user since 2007 (back when it had visible sequential numeric IDs, mine was six figures) and gave up a couple of months after the coming of Naughty Old Mr Car. For me his war on journalists in late 2022 was the last straw (I did return once for a silly joke in December when uttering the dread word 'Mastodon' was briefly banned), but even if that hadn't bothered me, the end of third party clients a month or so afterwards and the promotion of replies from gormless bluetick idiots above all else in the same timeframe would've killed it for me.

That said, I'm happy enough with Mastodon now; it feels a lot more like old (early-10s) Twitter.

I'm keeping the account, for now, on the basis that he might at some point get bored and go back to his imaginary car tunnels, and sell the remains of Twitter to someone sensible (presumably Automattic, which collects mortally wounded social networks).

I followed 3000 people and read and posted most days. Haven't even opened the app since the logo changed.

Most of the people I interacted with are now on Mastodon. I guess we just have different circles.

I was banned on the mastodon instance I was on for saying that people should have the same rights regardless on the color of their skin, so I decided that probably the people who leave for Mastodon are not the ones I should spend any time with anyhow.

"It rained the day I visited a particular city, I can't believe why people would live in cities if it rains all the time in them!"

Dude, you merely chose an instance with racists in charge. My guess is, it is probably isolated from the rest of the instances already anyway. Shop around for a better instance, most of them are very pleasant.

But I do not blame you for giving up - people in the past twenty or so years have been conditioned to centralized services each acting as huge singular meeting square, so this experience of having to choose a community seems unnatural to many. I don't know, maybe think of it as finding a decent subreddit on Reddit?

Mastodon has a very heavy moderation against anything that isn't the "SF mentality". And servers that don't moderate like this get defederated.

I prefer the more lenient X moderation.

You mean the "don't be a dick to others" mentality? Yeah, there's a lot of that on Mastodon, thank god.

I now have stuff shoved at me on the home screen that I don't know who they are, don't want to see their stuff, or both. I'm only ever on Twitter to see stuff from a small handful of people so it's very noticeable.

i completely stopped using it since july. the quality of the experience has been atrocious for me.

> I've not noticed anything different in the stuff I see/find/interact.

I definitely did. Russian disinformation from random accounts, such as "Catturd", show up on my home page.

X dying? It seems like it gets better every day

Better maybe for logged-in users. Without account it is hit or miss. In my case, I do not have account and it still shows just error page.

I have an account, but have not been logged in for a long time. I don't fear missing a lot.

Or maybe I don't have an account anymore. Didn't Musk announce that inactive accounts will be deleted?

I immediately stopped using it after they spammed random accounts to the timeline, even after following steps to stop it. Not a good look.

In theory this won’t matter in a couple months when Threads gets ActivityPub support. Makes sense from a branding perspective

Embrace, extend, enshitten

I guess I don't know the ins and outs of this but I imagine if there is any issue, mastodon server administrators will ban the threads servers from federating to their server, and then users can live happily in ignorance of whatever Threads is doing, unless they elect to join or migrate to a server which does federate it.

And I'm sure Usenet is just fine for the people who are still on it. For the mass market, it might be a different story. It's not like the masses are piling onto mastodon atm so maybe it'll always be niche unless someone finds a way to make a buck with it.

And maybe Signal will win the chat wars considering how much morally / intellectually better everyone feels using it

I hope not. Signal accounts require a phone number and an Android or iOS primary device or you can’t use the service.

There are already good, decentralized options that don’t require a phone at all. The time-tested XMPP+OMEMO has the characteristics I need while having the hardware requirements of a toaster compared to other options.

Yeah suuure... They have problems with transfering backups from one platfor to another(you can't officially transfer history from say android to desktop/ios) and this issue is from at least 2015...

I think he means it's not an issue even if Mastodon does remain niche, we're quite happy here how it is, Fosstodon went invite only recently because it felt like the server was becoming too generalised

And thus we see the sham of Mastodon, where people are supposed to be able to go for freedom from censorship and jagoff moderators... but where swaths of content or users are banned.

Jagoff moderators are as old, or older, than the internet my friend.

Hahaha, true!

Once you understand the subtlety, it is no longer "the sham of mastodon":

ActivityPub, the protocol, is the freedom you describe. But individual servers, using the mastodon software and activitypub protocol, they may or may not, depending on server admins.

If you don't like content bans or user bans, you have three options:

(1) find a mastodon server with the same values re freedom/censorship as you have.

(2) set up such a server yourself

(3) don't use mastodon/ap

I chose #3, after going so far as to set up an account on an instance. A couple other major issues killed it for me; the biggest being this bizarre, rabid hatred in the Mastodon community of being able to SEARCH content. I'm mystified that a tech-savvy segment of the population wants to publish material online and then "hide" it. I mean... how is that not monumentally ignorant?

And then there's the implication that you're supposed to choose a server based on some "interests" or "values." No. My interests change. This is supposed to be a global medium where ANY topics are discussed. Why should I be asked to pigeonhole myself in a special-interests community? Yes, I realize that some instances are "general," and content is propagated across instances, but I think this whole idea is dumb from the outset and creates confusion amongst the general public.

This goes back to the lack of search, too. If I'm interested in a topic, I expect to be able to search for it.

And finally I don't think your #1 is a solution, because the server I choose might be banned by other segments of the network and now I'm not reaching anyone. So... I still say this "freedom" is a sham.

> And then there's the implication that you're supposed to choose a server based on some "interests" or "values." No.

That's an easy fix:

Go to https://joinmastodon.org/ click Join mastodon.social

> search