With ActivityPub, Meta is playing on our turf. They don't have home field advantage here. ActivityPub isn't a protocol that they control.
I don’t know. Calling Meta a nonexistent problem sounds naive to me. Sure, something “hasn’t happened (yet)”. Except, it’s Meta … plenty has happened already. How many times are we going to allow selves to be fooled?
Chozo@kbin.social 8 months ago
maegul@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I mean, for now.
Mastodon, through its dominance is already shaping what the protocol is and isn’t. For instance, the Server to Client API that mastodon runs is of its own making and design and just about every microblogging app relies on it such that any other platform tries to mimic it. It’s become a de facto standard. Should mastodon change their API, many other platforms will feel compelled to follow suit. There are now voices calling for it to be standardised. BUT … talk to people working on the actual protocol and they’ll say they hate this because the protocol already has a standard for this and it should be used instead … and app developers will basically say “well, everyone is using the mastodon API already … why would I use this thing no one knows about”.
Threads/Meta can do exactly the same thing over time. And once they have control over how some parts of the fediverse operate, which they will have by having “the standard” and the dominance of users to force people to comply … then they can influence what is and isn’t in the standard to suit their purposes (think surveillance and ads) and even add things that only work on Threads, which of course will presumably attract more users (as Threads is already huge).
More abstractly … “our turf” here isn’t the protocol. The protocol is over-emphasised as some magic element that makes everything here work. It’s just a tool. The stuff that actually makes the fediverse work are all of the software platforms, such as Lemmy and Mastodon, that provide the actual social media we use. And they just use the protocol. It’s the quality and design choices of these platforms that are “our turf”, and these depend very much on the developers and the users and their motivations/desires. Threads is big enough that it can distort the network of motivations. An example … There’s a mastodon mobile app (Mammoth) that is the only one to implement a recommendation/algorithmic feed. One of their key motivations (they’ve stated so publicly) is to be ready for when Threads joins the fediverse so that their app can attract Threads users. They also run their own mastodon instance, which I can only presume they’d be happy to modify with their own features.
Another way they can exert influence is through altering the way moderation affects the fediverse. Moderating what comes through from Threads is likely to be onerous. It alone will be a reason for some instances defederating. But some instances will want to stay connected to the large userbase of Threads, and will tolerate some of the garbage coming through. The net effect will be to splinter the fediverse between those that can’t and those that can tolerate a lower average quality of user/content. Such a hard splintering wouldn’t occur if all of those users were spread out amongst more instances instead of coming from a single source/instance whose size alone attracts disproportionate interest and gravity (to the point that this discussion happens again and again).
Carighan@lemmy.world 8 months ago
So importantly, what’s the reason they would do any of this? Curb competition? Don’t make me laugh. User-wise the entire fediverse is so tiny compared to meta none of their metrics would even be able to show us due to rounding.
Is it really so difficult to assert that their only valid motivation could be to preempt EU legislation by talking about how they’re embracing open tech? And how completely blocking them would actually play into their narrative by allowing them to argue how useless trying to force big tech to be open is, clearly no one wants that’s they tried?
It’s a symbolic piece for them. If we can use that to lure users away from Meta all the better, but even there be real, the total amount lured might be relevant for AP but unnoticeable to Meta.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Pretty much the definition of a nonexistent problem.
maegul@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Sorry. But that’s just shallow word games, not to mention cherry picking my words.
The thing that has “happened” is that a mega corp with a track record has stated and acted on intentions to directly interact with the fediverse.
Calling that a nonexistent problem is like saying the sun doesn’t exist at night time.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 8 months ago
It’s word games being used to point to something real. A longer way of saying “let’s not solve a non-existent problem” is “There is uncertainty in our understanding and predictions, so we should not treat predicted future problems the same as current observed problems”.
Using the phrase “non-existent problem” just points to this wisdom by reminding the person that the future is not a real thing but rather a mental image, ie it doesn’t exist yet, and may never exist the way we predict it.
It’s similar to “cross that bridge when we come to it” referring to not focusing efforts on future problems when there are plenty of present problems to solve.
maegul@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Nothing about the nature of Meta and their track record is imagined. Risk management is the concept you’re missing here, where a bit more of that earlier in the story of how big tech monopolised the internet and our lives on it would have gone a long way. Now where trying to pick up the pieces and a whole generation doesn’t even understand the problem.
The current substack situation is similar where a bunch of people got tricked into getting trapped in a monopolised platform by being convinced they could leave anytime all while the value of network effects was being used to build walls around them without anyone remembering that platform lock in is almost always bad. Plenty of people could have done something about it just to keep substack honest. But here we are again.