Comment on Threads will allow you to follow Mastodon users by year-end, according to Meta meeting details | TechCrunch

• bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  lemmy.ml is the flagship instance. that's like asking what mastodon.social does for the fediverse.

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  • Carighan@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah what do they? Just their size? So if Threads brings in huge amounts of federation users that’d automatically make them relevant and useful to have around? Size matters, especially when it comes to your federated instance?

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    • bigMouthCommie@kolektiva.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      it's not their size. they are literally the developers.

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• dumpsterlid@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  And make no mistake, either the fediverse stays so tiny companies ignore it other than what Meta is doing now (to pre-empty EU legislation so they can point at supporting open interoperable formats), or we have to accept commercial enterprises will flood the fedi-space anyways if it takes off.

  I agree, the entrance of large corporations into the fediverse is nearly inevitable and I am ok with that. What matters is how and when they do it and how that changes the politics, identity and community of the fediverse. WE have the cards because as you say corporate social networks that basically have monopolies are going to eventually be forced by regulation (unless we are on even shittier timeline than I thought) to join the fediverse or do something similar.

  Think about the difference though between welcoming in meta to the fediverse like they are some cool popular kid that decided to join our lame party and now everyone wants to come to the party vs rejecting meta because we know their offer isn’t genuine and making them come back later to the fediverse in a much more precarious situation where they HAVE to work something out with us or they face geometrically growing legal and populist hostility that threatens the existence of their company?

  Which situation is more likely to result in a relationship more advantageous to normal people and communities on the fediverse? Which one is less likely to result in meta hijacking the public’s perception of the fediverse and subverting the reasons that the original denizens of the fediverse came here for?

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  • Marsupial@quokk.au ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I’m not okay with it.

    I’m all for cutting federation with any instance that allows them in to their space.

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    • dumpsterlid@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I think that is a good and healthy stance. No matter if it is right or not, I consider the survival of the idea of the fediverse as a separate space than corporate social networks requires there to be communities on the fediverse that reject corporate entities on principle.

      To use books as a metaphor, let’s say bookstores pioneered the idea of spaces that people can get books at. This is basically what happened with social networks (I know there are probably wrinkles to this but whatever).

      The fediverse may look like a bookstore superficially. In this metaphor it is a building with people dedicated to managing a large selection of books. People go in and out of it to get books. Trucks periodically come with large orders of books and those books are then distributed over time to people that visit the building.

      The fediverse isn’t a bookstore though, it is a library and it’s important that we don’t let that fact be forgotten.

      Nothing about the technology of the fediverse is really that special (though it is very impressive I am sure), it is the human structure and the idea of the fediverse as an entity that makes it special. In the same way that the difference between a bookstore and a library can’t really be found in different patterns of delivery trucks, book rentals or the arrangement of bookshelves in the building, neither can the difference between the fediverse and existing corporate social networks truly be found in the technical specifications at the end of the day. The real difference is in what humans see as the goals of a library vs a bookstore, so in other words the difference is that the people involved in creating and maintaining the fediverse conceptualize what they are doing fundamentally differently.

      Which isn’t to say I am against certain parts of the fediverse having companies involved, but it is very important that we win the ideological battle of defining social networks as communities to be maintained (which may or may not be a paying job for those involved) for the betterment of society, as a public service, not as an entity conceived to pursue profit.

      Again though, I think it is fantastic that communities are immediately rejecting meta on principle. Nobody, no matter their position on this, should be genuinely interested in meta’s first real attempt at joining the fediverse. It is just a silly way to go about interacting with an entity that has far more to lose than you do.

      We don’t have to grow at a viral rate, sure the fediverse being much larger is probably a good thing for the world and thus pushing for it can be seen as a moral imperative, but let’s not kid ourselves this is social media and memes not providing some essential service. It is ok if we don’t grow as absolutely fast as possible. The people that the fediverse is truly most life changing for anyways are the people most deeply hurt and traumatized by awful experiences on corporate social media where the company didn’t give af about bigotry, death threats, harassment etc…… *sigh *

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• sir_reginald@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Meta could take over the fediverse pretty easily once they’ve been here for a while.

  Nothing, they’re one cog in a pool of federated instances.

  Yes, Threads will be technically just an instance of a federated network with thousands of instances. But Threads is so fucking big in comparison that most posts will come from there. And at that point, they can impose their algorithms and recommendations on us.

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