Mark Zuckerberg: Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg: Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon

threads.net

38 pointshecanjog32 comments

This is huge and probably the first time Meta has made things interoperable with external services.

> Zuck: "Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol. Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I'm pretty optimistic about this."

Big endorsement for ActivityPub too. I've been sitting on the sidelines waiting to see which federated protocol gets adopted by the big players in the social media space

It'll probably be ActivityPub. All the other protocols are too onerous for people to understand.

AP has the simplicity of email, the potential for easy centralization (...like email, which makes it aligned with corporate interests) and is something that most users will be able to figure out. It's also very much build around the "worse is better" mindset, where the protocol has very obvious deficiencies yet people are so used to those deficiencies that it's growing in spite of those with no replacement in sight. ActivityPub will succeed for the same reason that Outlook is still the most used email client today even though everyone can agree that almost any other client is better: it's entrenched.

Nostr and Bluesky are trying to do decentralized identity, which while admirable, doesn't really align with corporate interests and it's left the federating/decentralized content parts very underdeveloped. Like, functionally speaking Bluesky is just a Twitter clone with an odd account scheme at the moment, their stuff doesn't actually federate, while Nostr has approximately zero relevance. (Bluesky at least has a userbase, even if I would personally consider it to be "the worst parts of Twitter before Elon took over". The worst of Twitter right now is well, honestly I would just say the entire site and be done with it.)

Thanks, this is helpful. I'm going to give AP a go.

Is it worth running self-hosted or better to just sign up at https://mas.to?

> the worst parts of Twitter before Elon took over

Do you mean primarily self promotion and aggrandizement?

(not a self plug)

A few friends of mine are working on a Fediverse hosting coop, starting soon with Mastodon, in case you want to be a friendly beta user: https://enoki.tech/

From what I know they're running it all on Kubernetes and have taken care of solid backups, scalability and they're taking stuff like data protection seriously. Perhaps they'll offer you a free 30 day trial for a single user instance. Can't hurt to ask.

I'm a k8s expert so I wouldn't pay to outsource that part. If I'm going to pay someone else, I don't want to be thinking at that level and more likely join one of the most popular servers with good moderation and policies

Self-hosted is possible - but you'll be tending to your server a lot. Media cache fills up quickly, upgrades can be complex, even a moderately popular post can eat bandwidth.

It is certainly possible but it's like the early days of blogging. If you want to learn how to run a system, do it. If you want to spend your time interacting with people rather than machines, use a dedicated service like mas.to.

If I have a popular post, do other servers use their media cache to reduce load on my instance?

They should do, yes.

But a popular post of mine was federated to over 2,500 servers - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/09/how-far-did-my-post-go-on-t...

Once you have a large enough following, your instance will send messages to the servers of all your followers. If they repost something, it will go to all their followers - and so on.

Thanks again!

Do you have any recommendations for software for self-hosted?

---

I'm somewhat leaning towards https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/ since it is written in Go and I could contribute back

https://btrf.ly/store/instances

Mastodon is receiving this positively, as well.

https://mas.to/tags/threads

I remember thinking the same thing about IM, XMPP, and SIP in the mid aughts. I'm still waiting!

Not the first time. Messenger used to support XMPP: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769

Messages on facebook (don't know if that's different or just predates it) also used to be email compatible. Pretty sure they killed that since I last used facebook.

Yes, there was such feature and I would be surprised if it would be still there; it was probably killed shortly after they introduced Messenger in place of Chat

The first time they went from “no support” to “support”.

They have absolutely done the reverse move haha

> probably the first time Meta has made things interoperable with external services.

Didn’t they support XMMP at some point years ago?

They did, just like Google and then both companies stopped supporting XMPP - in 2013 and 2014 respectively [1]

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Non-native_deployments

And thus, Meta cannot be trusted not only because of various privacy issues raised in last days by users regarding its joining fediverse, but also because it's highly possible that once it'll gather enough data and/or capture enough users it'll drop support for ActivityPub

I'm mostly excited to be able to follow Threads accounts from a non-Threads client.

I'll be very curious to see how it works.

Is it bad if I now hope that Zuck beats Musk both in and out of the ring?

You just need a lesson in "nonduelism".

And the mainstream, even Threads users generally, says.. "Masto-what?"

This reaction reminds me how introducing features to the less experienced and tech aware userbase may result in... somehow amusing entertaining show.

Years ago on fotka.pl (Polish hotornot equivalent) the company tried introducing XMPP support as chat component, doing what facebook later did. In feedback, users flooded forums with worthless threads regarding Jabber, creating this weird native to the site self-propelled meme, where they tried to convince themselves how this feature is somehow... dangerous.

The second time I saw this odd behavior happen was when the equivalent of classmates.com in Poland - naszaklasa introduced twitter-like microblogging service called "śledzik" (name comes from diminutive of herring which is śledź and śledzić, to follow sb). Users there reacted in similar way and soon they strongly opposed this feature by doing some form of protest with uploading various "anti" graphics into their photo galleries expressing how they feel about this feature no one ask for. The company behind the site kept microblog up until service ceased its operations in 2021.

I think fediverse is the term to use with the general public, rather than using the name from one of many implementations. Once they understand and map it onto the federated concept, they will then know how to evaluate and apply (and hype cycle) the term to new or other things

I think you give people way too much credit for what they understand. Most people understand "app open, do things". Beyond that, the actual technical implementation, even to the slightest degree, is completely lost. People don't care about the how, which is lost on most people in this space.

Federated is how the United States and many other nations are organized, it's not a large knowledge leap. Explain it as one big social network where each server can choose it's own rules and you decide which server you want to be on. You can even move between servers*, like states

I think you might diminish others too much

People definitely also understand big tech and consolidated platforms being a problem

Having 12 000 login pages is a formula for success.

Strange he only mentions posts on Threads, being available on Mastodon, but nothing about Mastodon posts being available via Threads…

Perhaps I’m too cynical?!

Embrace

*Zuckerberg

Ha, whoops. Thanks.

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