Here’s everything we know about it so far:
- It will use ActivityPub.
- It will be a side app of Instagram.
- It will most likely be called Threads.
- Your Instagram verification status will transfer over.
- There will be easy discovery tools in place: Your Instagram followers will be able to follow you on Threads as well (they won’t transfer over automatically).
What do you think?
No, I don’t want corporate social networks who farm data.
I don’t want corporate social media full stop. As soon as there is a profit motive things will always slowly decay.
I just hope it’s viable to survive on grants/donors a la Wikipedia. Add some “awards” like on reddit, and that should help as well.
Aye, but these things need running like a business. They are too expensive and too complicated, they need oversight, planning, and proper governance if they aren’t single user personal instances. Opencollective seems to work well for Mastodon for funding and might work for Lemmy too.
Yeah, personally I would’ve gladly paid a few bucks a month for an unlimited API key that I could’ve used in Apollo for the utility I got out of Reddit if they also had some sort of data privacy policy. Casual users could’ve continued to use the site or the official app that dealt out ads.
It’s probably a good idea to limit/defederate with this when it shows up, as it’s a vector for EEE and Meta will be doing the usual data collection shit they do with their users, but now with Fediverse users as well. They just got hit with a big fine for violating the GDPR.
Yeah, I hope they’re pretty much de-federated. I wish them and the users of their platform the best, but I don’t want to contribute to feeding that beast.
Why would you join when you can just follow the accounts that interest you on it from Lemmy or Mastodon/Pleroma/Akkoma/etc ???
I’m a photographer and I have a relatively large following on Instagram; all my professional and social contacts are on there. So, that’s why it’s personally appealing to me. The Fediverse has (so far) been a bit of a lonely experience for me (but I still like it a lot).
Oh snap, i didn’t think about it from that perspective! Instagram is still the place where sharing my work gets the most reach, I hadn’t thought about what this app might mean for that.
Yup. It has the potential to be a very useful tool. Currently, I use Stories to post some text-based thoughts, which is ridiculous, haha.
It’ll be interesting to see how this and ig interface, and how this will play out in the fediverse. Imagine a future where instagram users could follow pixelfed accounts!
Yes! This can be glorious!
This is from the company that weights anger five times higher than likes for its algorithm. The one that is trying to force feed me “shorts” with no ability to opt out. So much of the Facebook experience is non-consensual. I wouldn’t touch another platform from them.
Meta’s main income stream is data mining and they will take advantage of federation to collect data (not metadata, but human-generated content is still very valuable for AI model training) of users on federated instances. Any content that federates over to this instance will be cached on Meta servers where they can do whatever they like with it. There is no legal data protection framework for content retrieved from federated networks and Meta’s lawyers will try to argue that federating with this platform counts as giving consent to the platform’s TOS. Meta platforms introduce lots of advertising and bots to the network. Don’t just ignore this platform, give them the Gab treatment.
This is a somewhat terrifying concept to grapple with. I think letting Meta federate would be letting vomit soak into the carpet
If a large corp wants to do what you’re suggesting, they don’t need to launch a big announced project.
They can spin up a federated instance with just one user and no references to who owns it, then have patsy accounts on other instances subscribe to their instance and get all the data they want sent to their semi secret instance.
It would be very difficult to identify this in a large, healthy federation with tons of users and lots of small personal instances.
Anyone can scrape data and corporations are already doing it. But data scraping is considered a legal gray zone and companies can be prevented from accessing data that they are not legally authorized to use, which is why companies like OpenAI retrieve their training data from data dumps and don’t just run web crawlers across the entire internet. A publicly announced platform with an appropriate clause in its Terms of Service can grant Meta the legal ownership of all data from the fediverse that arrives on their platform.
Yep I agree. I saw a similar sentiment on discord regarding data harvesting and defederation. They are going to do it regardless and there’s not much anyone can do to stop them.
If these large sites start communicating via activitypub, it will be interesting to see how it changes dynamics. It would be interesting to be able to see and follow friends from social networks I left behind over the years.
Absolutely not
I was never on Twitter, why join that cesspit now?
It depends. How much porn are we talking?
LOL.
It’s Meta, you might as well ask ‘should the henhouse accept the fox’s invitation to a hearty banquet this evening?’
I genuinely believe this could be successful.
Mastodon STILL has UX issues, and the rest of ActivityHub and the Fediverse are impenetrable to the average person. That will change over time, but in the meantime, I can’t even get people to use Signal for god’s sake, let alone explain which Lemmy instance is best for them.
I still have an Instagram because my friends do. Without Instagram DMs and iMessage, I lose real life connections. If they fold in a Twitter-esque client to Instagram, that I can interact with from Mastodon if I want? That sounds like a really strong value proposition to me, and is the only way your non-techy friends are joining this parade any time soon.
But also, we’ve got to make sure these massive companies don’t snuff out what Lemmy and Mastodon are building. There’s a group of suits somewhere right now thinking of how to monetise this platform, and we need to be prepared for that.
I feel your pain 1000%
I tried for the longest time to get my wife, other friends, family, etc. to use Signal to no avail. Trying to explain Lemmy or Mastadon to them is like trying to explain the concept of fire to cavemen. (Not that they’re dumb or even tech illiterate necessarily, I just don’t think most folks care enough to bother with it sadly right now).
I at least succeeded with my partner, so the most private conversations I have are safe in Signal. But unfortunately Meta knows just about every party, dinner, or event I’ve been too for the last ~8 years from having planned it in either Messenger or Instagram. It’s shame we have to choose connection over privacy, and I hope someday someone hits on the magical combination of privacy, UX, and blind luck and makes a service we can use without feeling like a product.
I feel the same pains with Signal, I was very lucky in the sense that basically everyone I needed to communicate with would join, however a few members, mostly my brother which is known to be very much a stick in the mud wouldn’t join. While I love him to death, he can be very much a pain to bargain with. Maybe someday…
Mastodon STILL has UX issues, and the rest of ActivityHub and the Fediverse are impenetrable to the average person. That will change over time, but in the meantime, I can’t even get people to use Signal for god’s sake, let alone explain which Lemmy instance is best for them.
Wouldn’t it make it so much worse? If getting people to sign up for a Lemmy instance is a hard sell, it would be even harder telling them that they’ve now got to choose an instance that doesn’t federate with Meta stuff. (unless you’re fine with letting Meta in, which I’m not).
Yes, to all of this.
UX people probably call this “friction” or something. I think the fediverse currently has too much “friction” for the average person.
Whereas with Threads it’ll be as simple as tapping the “Continue using Facebook” button. 🤔
If people are ok with Facebook, why would they be not ok with Twitter?
Oh, I’m sure they are. I just mean, if The Masses are going to try anything, it’s going to be the easier of the two options (with loads of marketing behind it). :)
I still have an Instagram because my friends do. Without Instagram DMs and iMessage, I lose real life connections.
Yep, I’m in a similar boat with real life connections as well as content creators I like. I’d love to drop Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, but so much of the people and content I enjoy are only in those places. I’d love to be a shepherd, but that’s easier said than done with friends and family, let alone a content creator you’d be invisible to through no fault of your own.
I’d still like to minimize my presence in such places, and I’m actively working toward that. But I think it’s going to be a long time before I’m completely out of there, if ever.
so just twitter but owned by meta, nah fam im good
It will use activity pub… until it gets adoption and then it will close the doors like they did with XMPP. Also its Facebook so anything they touch should be avoided like the plague. They have proven time and time again they are not to be trusted, they were in the Snowden docs & they have had numerous lawsuits against them.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/10/31/20940532/edward-snowden-facebook-nsa-whistleblower
“and if you don’t know , now you know”
I don’t see a problem so long as they do so in good faith - for example publishing full event contents to ActivityPub instead of adding a link back to the Facebook Threads app, which is basically what a lot of news sites do with their RSS feeds to get advertising money.
So long as they do that, it’s not really possible to do a rug-pull. There are far more Facebook users than Fediverse users after all, so it’s going to be advertising for the Fediverse for as long as this lasts and if users would like to remain part of it they’ll have to move to another server. That is, assuming it ends.
To answer the question though, I don’t care for microblogging personally and I don’t like Meta as a company so I won’t use it. I appreciate the scepticism but I feel optimistic.
so long as they do so in good faith
Good faith…
This is facebook we’re talking about here.
It will use ActivityPub.
When the Twitter exodus to Mastodon happened at the end of last year, everyone was speculating what would happen if Google would enable Activity Pub for Gmail and suddenly every Gmail user would be able to post (and what would happen after they start monetizing it with ads).
That never happened but this is the first time one of the billion dollar tech giants has actively published their intention of creating something in the fedi-space. And of course it has to be Meta. One of the shadiest of the “big tech”.
I’m extremely skeptical of their good intentions and I’m a bit worried about what will happen to fediverse after all those 1.2 billion MAU’s start flooding the protocol.
I said this on Mastodon last night, but I just don’t see a way this works out in Meta’s favor. They can’t “take over” or run Fediverse out of business, and any instance worth being on is going to block them immediately, and it’s going to let people know about Fedi who might not otherwise have known about it. What is the plan here exactly?
Yeah. Facebook won’t be happy until it destroys humanity entirely.
I have little hope if any that this will actually be a meaningful replacement for Twitter or even a competitor in the micro-blogging world. But it being Meta ESPECIALLY makes me reluctant to even try it.
i’m sure this has to have appeal for someone, but i can’t think a person this less appeals to than me. i literally only use twitter because it’s incredibly useful for following happenings pretty much anywhere, and i cannot imagine anybody i care about is going to full-time switch to this platform. people are struggling to even switch to Jack’s exact clone!!
Jack Dorsey’s clone/competitor is dead on arrival for me. Dorsey endorsed an anti-vaccination conspiracy theorist for the American presidential election. So… Yeah, not going to touch that one.
i’m pretty confident most of the benefits of Bluesky are also literally just “it doesn’t have all the users Twitter does” because their wait list is what, 2 million? of course the site isn’t a shitshow, it has like no people! and when it does, it’ll go just like Twitter, lol.
deleted by creator
I was able to get into BlueSky thanks to a random person giving me an invite. The userbase is about 100,000 but I’d say maybe 10-15% are actually participating in the community.
It has a very chaotic, early Twitter feel to it. There’s a perpetual reply chain called “The Hellthread”, which has replies numbering in the thousands daily where folks are chatting, sharing memes, selfies, what have you. The userbase seems to be mostly hard-leftists, shitposters, and the LGBT community (some of the most popular users embody all three of those).
Honestly? I like it. The users there are very chaotic in poking fun at the world around them, but are incredibly supportive and positive to each other. Of the alternatives to Twitter I’ve tried, BlueSky (jack’s shittiness aside) is the service that reminds me the most of why I liked Twitter before it went to hell with bots and misinformation campaigns.
If it is federated, I don’t need to join.
If it is NOT federated, I don’t want to join.Pretty much my thoughts as well.
My bet is that they’re going to allow other people from the fediverse to post on it but won’t allow instagram users to see other instances. Wouldn’t want your customers getting off the official servers now.
