https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/meta-threads-engagement-dropped-red-hot-debut-tracking-firms-say-rcna94256
Last week, the text-based social media platform reported a record 100 million sign-ups in just five days.
Typical fear of missing out behavior. Folks flock to Threads to see what it's all about, see that it actually sucks, and bail.
Yeah FOMO is a helluva drug. I'd be willing to bet that while there are plenty of users on the newplaform, people actually posting is not there yet, and with the lack of content for users to doom scroll they're hopping back to whatever app they came from. Most people don't give two shits about actually engaging with a given userbase, they just want to doom scroll content and zone out.
It's generally when you're stuck in a loop of reading negative posts/articles. I think the phenomenon comes from how when you read a negative article/piece of news you feel down, so you want to scroll further in the hopes of seeing something positive to lift your spirits. But then of course it's only more negativity, and so you keep going. And the algorithms of Twitter/Facebook knows this, so they don't tend to help you find something positive.
Nothing positive is needed. It's an outrage engine that keeps you involved by edging on the max level of disturbance you are comfortable to consume. Seeing, posting reactions, having likes enables you to keep it going.
That's fair, I don't partake in that side of the web myself but when I get stuck in it it's usually because I read something depressing and am scrolling desperately hoping for good news.
I think alot of it relates to just scrolling through news and wanting more content/headlines. It's not that users are necessarily seeking out bad news or "doom", it's just that, given the state of the world today <motions broadly>, that's what a lot of the news ends up being. I think I often engage in "doomscrolling", but I'm not doing it because I want to see bad news, I'm an information addict and I'm just trying to get as much content as I can. Reddit fed that habit well, but I've moved on from there. And it's not necessarily a bad thing if Lemmy can't feed that addiction, not seeing new content pushes me off and forces me back into the real world or on to other sites/apps. I'm fine with that, I hated my constant need to flip through Reddit whenever I was bored before.
It's been a thing for a while, basically just mindlessly scrolling for hours on end on a neverending feed
Covid era when many people had nothing to do, were more worried and anxious than usual, and the internet seemed full of concerning and bad news. The term has never meant that much to me personally. I’ve only regular scrolled.
I also think that there were linch pins with in the threads app, people followed shadow accounts for there friends etc. Now I wouldn't be surprised if alot of those friends then didn't get the app, making said shadow follow pointless
I wouldn't say its FOMO, I think most people just had higher hopes for it as a direct Twitter replacement instead of the cesspool of reposters, uninteresting celebs, and wylin' out social media managers that it serves up in its feed. I don't mind Meta, I don't mind that they want to eventually federate, I just wish the feed wasn't pure trash.
All the celeb shit is the number 1 reason I always hated these platforms. I also feel like the only people somewhat defending twitter are those with a large following/celebrity status
What you described isn't FOMO, that's just curiosity. Just checking out a new popular app and then just not using it due to a lack of engagement.
In other news lemmy engagement is up 200% on the week
Don't fact check me I pulled this out my ass
lemmy doesn't have this kind of data because we don't have the zucc in our asses.
They gave up all their personal data to see a crappy algo-driven social media site. Meta still considers this a win.
The real answer is nothing, assuming they already had an Instagram account. People are all up in arms, but the majority of 'signups' were just people clicking the activation button as opposed to creating a new account.
That said, I currently will praise anything that takes more users away from Twitter. Lesser of two evils and all that.
Not that I disagree much, but... what a world we live in where Meta is the lesser of two evils...
I’d argue Meta takes the cake just with Cambridge Analytica in terms of damage. Let alone all the other shit. But yeah, choose between ebola and the black plague…
Plus, Elon is more likely to run Twitter into the ground than Zuck is Meta, so that alone makes Meta the bigger threat.
I agree, it’s amazing. Musk has been such a dumbfuck that he has managed to make Mark Zuckerberg look good by comparison.
As LTT said. Threads is the result of the Zuck flicking his tongue out and tasting blood.
But I mean we (society, not me, miss me with that) are still clearly subscribing to a social media site run by the lizard people and calling it an improvement.
Which says a lot.
And, unless your Playstation is broken, less fun.
...wait, scratch, that, even if your Playstation is broken, he's less fun.
Zuck is not a lesser evil. He's the same evil. And Jeffrey bezos this week is having a laugh because nobody's paying attention to him at the moment.
Pretty sure all new users are required to have an Instagram? I know for sure the two are linked. No deleting Threads without deleting your Insta.
I feel like what you're talking about is complaining about someone taking a dump on another, much larger pile of crap.
If you were already on Instagram that ship has sailed.
They got nothing new. Just a few shitposts from Instagram users saying “I’m on Threads.”
"Last week, the text-based social media platform reported a record 100 million sign-ups in just five days."
LOL The biggest bullshit of the year... Meta just created shadow accounts of all Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent...
100 million isn't that much when it comes to Meta. There's over 2 billion "active" Instagram users that all were prompted to download the app. That means only 0.005% of Instagram accounts fell for it.
I have no doubt that at least that many people tried it out. When I went to the Android App store, Meta was paying for a front and center promotion of Threads.
while you're correct based on instagram's numbers, the other commenter would be correct if it was a British billion which is a million millions. just a fun fact 🦄
That's true, although the long scale billion hasn't been a thing even in Britain for decades.
If it's fun facts you like, try this: English is the clear odd one out, most other languages use milliard for 10^9 and billion for 10^12.
milliard - love it ty for that. Reminds me of: French: L'ananas Italian: L'ananas Icelandic: Ananas Portuguese: O ananás Swedish: Ananas German: Die Ananas
English: Pineapple
Is there a way to check if a user account exists for my instagram account without logging in?
people reported already having followers before ever using the platform, meaning all people automatically had an account created for them. that (and many other things) is also very legally problematic in the EU which is why the service isnt available here.
It’s not hard to understand what was happening.
The issue with the EU is you can’t mingle and mix user data from two separate services.
"An account was already created for them" because it's the same Meta account. You can just follow people when you start your account without them necessarily activating threads.
Sole benefit of Brexit identified. We get to hand over our data to meta before you guys. It’s all been worth it.
I saw this in browser: You can go the person Instagram account and see if they have a thread logo next to it.
Exactly. Everybody checked what is this about, then stopped gave shit and here we are
Bots generate user engagement! Granted, it's bad engagement, but it also generates jobs for the moderator AI teams
Wasn't it announced to be the case? So it's "just" without consent, which is already bad enough.
It's Google Plus all over again.
If people wanted the bird app, they would have already got the bird app, if they don't like the bird app, they would have got a Mastodon account.
It feels like the same reason that Reels isn't doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can't force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.
I should have been more specific, what I meant was "people who want to use a microblogging platform but don't like who's running the bird app. "
But I would say reddit is mainstream enough that random 40 year olds probably has heard of it now, after all the large big profile celebrity AMAs, it's the 10th most visited site in the world and 6th in the US.
And Misskey is mostly Japanese artists who need more privacy. Hence, Misskey is a Japanese product, and Japanese Twitter refugees might find Misskey useful. People should join any other Misskey instance instead, if Misskey.io is full.
Weirdly placed comment, but I do think these platforms need the advertising, so do continue to spread the word
Just to point out many ex-Digg users are 30-40 years old. I would agree a 40yo normie who only use Facebook wouldn't know about Reddit.
I'd say a lot of these 40 yo on Facebook actually got on reddit during the QAnon nonsense.
There was ridiculous Q shit on reddit before Qanon became popular. In fact, that’s the first place I ever heard of it. I came upon a sub called, I think, cbts_radio (for “calm before the storm”) and was just like, what the fuck is this? It was a sub for off-topic casual discussion split off from the original cbts sub, and it was filled with the most ridiculous anti-Democrat/Hillary Clinton screechy conservative bullshit I’d ever seen. Qanon didn’t enter the public awareness for another couple of years after that.
Google+ had more than one thing wrong with it. Just for example ...
The precursor to Google+ was called Google Buzz, and it was rolled out to Gmail users in a way that exposed privacy & security problems with Gmail contacts. This led to a lawsuit and a settlement which Google had to obey when releasing their next "social media" attempt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz#Privacy
As a result, Google+ became a heavy-handed effort that tried to hew closely to the settlement's privacy & consent requirements while assimilating seemingly-unrelated projects such as YouTube comments.
IMHO Google+ had one good thing: Circles. You could define groups of people to share stuff with, without those people having to "join a group".
I don't think people understood it well, though.
It feels like the same reason that Reels isn’t doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can’t force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.
I'm never going to download or sign up for TikTok. I know Meta isn't really that great as far as privacy goes, but at least they don't share information directly with the CCP. Fuck the CCP. IG Reels works just fine for me. I actually can't stand the IG home feed because of the algorithm showing me what it wants to show me instead of a chronological timeline of the posts of the people I follow, so I mostly just use IG for stories and Reels.
All social media based in the U.S. share information to the three letter agency, confirmed by the NSA leaks.
I trust America more than China. If some foreign government has to have my data, I'd rather it be America.
Why? Isnt a government that directly affects you a more immediate problem? Sure we're not authoritarian, but the things the FBI, ATF, CIA, NSA, ETC have done sure look like it.
Yeah I hate that curated list bullshit. It made both FB and YouTube worse, too. And both were intended to manipulate users into spending more time there. Ironically, I haven't been on as many YouTube dives into the random following interesting videos from the recommended ones since they started curating their list based on what you've previously watched (and seemingly picking one or two of them to tunnel vision on).
YouTube used to work by showing you videos that other people who watched that video watched, which was really great for music discovery. Now it shows me things that I already watched with a small sprinkling of new things. The front page still suggests things I haven’t seen before related to things I watched. I think they were pressured to make that change because it was taking impressionable people too quickly down rabbit holes of extremism… seems like it still does though.
Unless you live in China, are a Chinese national, or have someone living in China who could be used to blackmail you, then you shouldn't care much about what data the CCP has on you.
Meta shares data with the NSA and likely any other US allies, so that might be a slight concern if you live in any country like that.
Lemmy makes all its data essentially free for everyone to grab, so... Hi CCP, Hi NSA, Hi CIA, Hi MI6, Hi FSB...
I mean, to be honest, I feel like it's the quality of the content in there. I used my old phone (the one I use for apps like threads) to get a threads account and people are using Threads as if they're using instagram.
For example, you see a pocture of someone or a drawing, you get into the post to see the 45 comments people left and all of them are:
Comment #1: "Magnificent 🥰😍" #2: "Amazing 🤩" #3: "WOW!! 🔥🔥"
And so on.
At least in twitter there is more "discussion" (albeit toxic and usually useless) or at least more people sometimes talking about interesting things.
That's pretty much exactly what I expected. Instagram is exactly like this. Filled to the brim with fake engagement, bots, and an occasional real person account, who also happens to be doing things that horribly affect people's mental health
I guess it turns out that when you pretty much automatically port over so the Instagram users they treat it like Instagram.
toxic and useless dont really summarize it imo- last few times I went there the top 10-15 comments were just screaming right wingers yelling about a conspiracy of some sort no matter what the topic is
Looking in the replies of any new scientific discovery is infuriating, they're all spouting inane shit about how "science changed its story, so it has no credibility, this is proof that the earth is flat and 6000 years old."
the only reason it has any users is that it gave some fakeout on insta UI that your friends were talking about you on threads and, as per Meta usual, it was all bullshit. typical zuccing egotism for his upcoming cagematch.
But, he added, Sensor Tower data suggests a significant pullback in user engagement since Threads’ launch: On Tuesday and Wednesday, the platform’s number of daily active users were down about 20% from Saturday, and the time spent for user was down 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.
strange. my "engagement" on lemmy is... "all day". strange indeed.
Maybe because we "care for each others" opinions. The weird thing about converting instagram users automatically to thread users is, that instagram is mostly a one-to-many communication. One Insta Model posting her newest picture and then thousand others comment and like it. Thread (and Lemmy) are more back and forth and commenting on comments. That means we have an active dialogue where things are discussed in a more natural way. The Insta model does not give a shit about a bi-directional communication with their followers. They prefer a mostly one way communication of send and receive (like or die). They don't really care for their followers opinions and certainly are not interested in a deeper dialogue with them. They want to expand their reach and likes first of all. Threads is very different in the interaction than instagram.
This is the problem I've always had with instragram. For a while I was storing certain pictures on there only because it seemed like a good place to store them that I could share with people if the time ever came for that (it didn't). The engagement side of things looked very slim.
absolutely. I am in search of peers, not influncers.
I would suspect that most of us on discussion board style platforms (and lemmy in particular) want peer engagement - something that is building quite nicely on lemmy.
This is a good point. It makes me wonder if maybe "engagement" isn't going to be a metric for whether Threads succeeds or fails. (Other things I have read suggests that it's hot garbage in ways other than lack of dialogue, so I still think people are dropping it, but they might be able to fix those things).
I tried it, because I still have a Facebook account I barely used.
I got like two screens of people I subscribed to and after they are out of new posts the platform tries to push a bunch of popular influencers and brands that I couldn't care less about. They couldn't get me to close it faster if they tried.
Just: Honestly, we figure Twitter will keep staggering along until its servers implode.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/VbX1r-Vre9o
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Are the Threads user numbers being quoted still inflated because everyone with an Instagram account received a shadow Threads account?
I'm pretty sure the platform that kills Twitter will be Twitter. It's not going to be a question of a superior platform luring people away, Twitter is just going to become unusable because of the management. When that happens, replacements will compete with one another. I don't personally have an opinion on which is going to win the competition, but I think you make good points about important users vs features.
I haven't, but thats actually surprising. Back in 2001 someone had my name for their Yahoo email (it's an unusual but common one) and decided then that I wouldn't let it happen again.
For the next few years, I would immediately register for everything that looked like I would use it.
Got a good Hotmail in the 90s. But later on I would register for every little thing like Hushmail. Shushmail. Then MySpace. The best, though, was when I managed to get an invite in late 2007 for a little email service provider that was called Gmail.
Suck it every other variation of RhetoricalOrator@gmail.com!
(Not my actual email.)
I got firstlastname on Gmail and I find it a curse now. There are old people all over the place with the same name that simply can't remember their email address and end up using mine. I have had everything from non profit fun runs in North Carolina to aerial crop photos from Idaho that apparently farmers pay for? It was like a $100 a month service... . Luckily I use first.lastname so I can filter out their emails quickly since they never have the . Occasionally when it's an email from a small company or something like that i send responses but most of it I just junk now.
i have what i imagine is a fairly unusual variation: my firstname.lastname is pretty common in the english speaking world, but my last name is apparently derived from a place if you go back far enough, so i use firstname.of.lastname. subtle but different.
This is me too, including every janky MMO I think I might remotely like. Gotta grab my character name. But Threads, haven't bothered to touch it.
I see exactly where you're coming from but personally when making usernames I can never re-use one because I always feel like the next one I make is going to be "the one" and trump all of my pathetic previous attempts lol.
That urge to be better, to continue growing has entire life. Never satisfied. New vehicle? First thought is "how can I tweak it to make it better?" Then I begin tweaking with things and am happy. The second that I can't find more things to tweak and feel that it's as close to perfect as can be within my capabilities it becomes stale and I lose interest.
This is a cancer for my passion in writing lyrics as in my opinion art can NEVER be good enough. The more time you put into it, the better it gets and if a change I've made makes something worse I start from square one and begin again. I've been writing music for nearly my entire life but only ever actually recorded music in the beginning when it was just a hobby. Then I realized that it was something I could actually be good at and became serious. Haven't recorded a single track since. I just write and write and write. Even when I make something beautiful, to me, that I made that? Just means I'm capable of making something better on the next page so the beauty is forgotten as soon as it was realized.
Sorry for the rant and personal details! Sometimes I use my comments as a means of introspection. Would just paste them into my notes app but I don't. I leave them in the hopes that maybe someday someone can maybe help me figure myself out or at the very least not feel so alone if they are similar.
Have a nice day/night.
... another terrific username, notelonmusk, although I am slightly concerned that you might be lying.
See someone called me KlossN in high school because it was similar to my last name, and now noone calls me that but it's been my username everywhere since. Not making a fucking threads account tho, if y'all want my name you can have it
That's why I believe that the username crisis is real. Future generations won't have short usernames and will have to use increasingly longer usernames to have a unique one, or have a Redditesque default [word1][word2][4numbers].
We might as well just go all out and just have everyone use a UUID with minimal chances of username collision.
If you really need to have the same name in many services, it’s going to be really hard or even impossible. Having a nice and short name in one service is possible, because the name of the service adds some extra length to the whole thing. Just think of Lemmy names for example [shortName]@[InstanceName].[something]. The whole thing is actually pretty long, so making that unique is very easy.
Old comment by this time, but their usernames are tied to their Instagram account, correct? So there wasn't much, "securing their name" From that angle.
I couldn't personally say as it's not available in Europe.
I'm one of the many who deactivated not too long after it launched. My dashboard was just being filled with so many users (mostly celebrities and influencers) who I don't recall ever following or even being on my sphere of interest. It doesn't help that their posts are inorganic attempts to spur engagement.
No hashtags, no anonymity…. Threads has no purpose and is likely to fail unless this changes
no anonymity
I doubt that Instagram users who willingly install an another app made by Facebook care about that lol
They want anonymity from relatives/friends. Most people don't care much about advertisers knowing their interests.
This is the issue with the new "own nothing, subscription only" and "if you're not the customer, you're the product" type models. Everyone went to Threads to take a look at the brand new thing, but now everyone has seen the new thing they're gone.
All the hype that was built up initially based on that curiosity comes across as arrogance and empty promises as users inevitably get bored of the new shiny thing that's really just another attempt to harvest them for their metadata and ad-sense.
Everyone went to Threads to take a look at the brand new thing, but now everyone has seen the new thing they're gone.
And they can't delete their account without deleting their Instagram while also sending their phone's data, including health data, to Meta.
Anyone signing up for a new Meta account isn't going to be suddenly surprised at how invasive it is. The people who signed up for Threads obviously don't give a shit about privacy, as much as I'd like to think otherwise.
I've had this conversation many times, and they always say something like "I have nothing to hide, so I don't care", to which I respond with "I have to hide, either, but nothing I want to share. Since you have nothing to hide and you don't care, what's your bank account number, tax ID number, credentials, etc. etc. I won't use it for anything bad, promise."
They still don't get it....
I’ve had some success by asking them to unlock their phone and give it to me so I can read their messages and look at their photos. As they refuse, I tell them “but you just said you’ve got nothing to hide and you don’t care?”
And you could add that you probably wouldn't learn as much about them by looking at their phone for a few minutes than Threads transmits to Meta every second of every day.
I did that once to a friend of mine, but because he knows me and known I'm trustworthy, he did it hahaha I had to resort to verbalizing the invasive actions I would take when I got the phone so that my point would sink in
Especially since there's over 2 BILLION Instagram users. Why would anyone who uses Instagram have any concerns with Threads?
This is absolutely not a concern for 99% of people. As much as we (rightfully) scream about it on Lemmy and Mastodon, most people don't care.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and others are already collecting this information already, it's so strange to see people acting like this is a new phenomenon.
Threads never released in the EU in the first place, so this absolutely is not the reason for lowered engagement.
In an indirect way it could be though - not having the entirety of the EU on Threads is a huge non-starter for many people, as many of their favourite influencers, celebrities, companies, etc will be from the EU who were never able to get on it.
It's pretty hard to start working in the EU if you look at the absolute pile of data that Threads demanded. The GDPR paperwork to make sure they can get away with that AND still comply to GDPR would be more than the whole internet.
What I'm hearing from your statement, is that we need a GDPR-like ruleset in every country.
Is it because it's filled to the brim with old memes? That would make me want to leave a new place. Tried kbin social the other day and the first three pages were all full of the old memes being posted here and i spent half an hour or so trying to figure out how to filter them out but couldn't so I just uninstalled.
Lol I feel like !antiquememesroadshow@lemmy.world polluted a lot of the internet lately.
Look i'm not that much of a curmudgeon that i begrudge people enjoying themselves and getting along, I just need to be able to easily filter content i have no interest in, memes/macros being one of those. I'm still accessing lemmy through mobile browser and can skim past all that quite easily on here, but kbin blew every image up automatically and it was 90% of the content and i couldn't figure out how to turn it off.
You should just need to block the community. There's a 🚫 symbol on the sidebar of a community, just click that and the posts should stop showing up on any of your feeds.
If you're on mobile, the formating is kinda fucked so you'll have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find it.
The problem is that multiple unrelated communities also saw a surge of old memes when the original community blew up
Yeah there was some boring fucking trend going around where people posted 10 year old memes. I had to block four or five communities to have a usable lemmy experience.
In some ways this whole thing feels like WoW classic. A lot of people trying to relive the internet of their youth, while not realizing things weren't actually that great back then either. I can haz cheesburger? What the fuck were we thinking.
To me that all felt very much like a Reddit thing. Somebody made a joke about that about posting old memes that was MAYBE mildly amusing, then everybody went ahead and killed the horse before beating it for 24 hours.
Agreed. These "trends" that last for a couple of days before switching to the next one are stupid. People just start spamming old shitty content only because everyone else is too. It definitely makes Lemmy more active but getting my feed filled with low effort shitposts is not the kind of activity I'm looking for. I've been here for a month and I've already blocked more users/communities than I ever did on reddit.
I've heard of one instance called beehaw that's seems to be more curated so to say. It may interest you.
Thanks but I'll rather curate my feed myself. Beehaw is a bit too woke for my liking.
We were younger. There's no shame in being young, and liking things then that seem stupid now.
Reminds me of the old saying: "how do you make a million dollars in the stock market? Start with a billion"
Start with a billion visitors, then snag 100 million, then keep 1 million then blaghole the site
They launched it without addressing the obvious issues like spam and low-quality content. The easy migration from Instagram basically turned threads into... Instragram. Literally the same low quality posts and low quality engagement of Instagram transfered over. Seriously, have you ever read comments on Instagram? It's the bottom of the barrel in the every sense of the expression. That's Threads now.
Also, poetically threads on Threads are even harder to follow and navigate than Twitter.
Isnt instagram primarily used for.... pictures and images? I seen comments the times i have used it - the comments are generally very low quality and low brow.
I played around with it and it’s basically useless without a follower only feed. And the posts tend to just basically disappear forever after a feed refresh.
But if they follow through on ActivityPub integration I’ll be stoked to follow all the normies that couldn’t get by on mastodon that are using threads. More content = more better.
I won't be happy if they integrate federation. Ever heard the phrase "embrace, extend, extinguish"? It's a tactic used by large companies to squash growing competition.
Google used it, for example, to squash a growing open-source chat messenger protocol called XMPP. (Think of XMPP like ActivityPub.) Google allowed its Google Talk application to integrate with people using XMPP. (They embraced XMPP.)
Then, they added their own proprietary features that wouldn't work with normal XMPP users. (They extended, or built on top of, XMPP.)
Then, they cut support for XMPP integration, leaving it effectively dead in the water. XMPP users suddenly had a list of Google Talk users in their friend list who would never appear online again, whereas Google Talk users maybe had one or two people in their friend list who looked like they'd moved on from Google Talk. (They extinguished XMPP.)
Now imagine that happening with Threads. You, a Mastodon user, follow a bunch of people who just happen to be on Threads. There are some things Threads users can do that you can't, but you don't really mind. It works well enough. Then, one day, Threads stops working with Mastodon. Suddenly, over half of the people you followed are no longer available to you. The only way you can follow them again... is to join Threads.
"ever heard of embrace extend extinguish???"
Lololol yes. And the ploum article people parrot about xmpp too.
There is a lot of groupthink in the fediverse and not enough critical thinking.
Threads integrating will highlight the serious value in activitypub. I personally don't know why they would integrate unless they want to just completely dismember Twitter and blue sky or get in front of govt regulations.
The danger here is that Threads will suddenly be > 99% of the activity and user base in one fell swoop. You might find that Mastodon doesn't scale as well as you think. It might also be that Threads deliberately or half assedly doesn't federate properly, so that being a non-Threads user means posts aren't visible inside of Threads or suffer from down ranking or other issues.
I'd add that historically federation hasn't gone well when a big fish enters a small pond. XMPP was cited above as an example of that. At the time you had proprietary services like AOL / AIM, ICQ, Instant Messenger. XMPP was going to liberate us from proprietary and even Google got on board for a bit before dumping it.
The problem with big companies is they want all the cake to themselves and abhor having to yield control or cooperate with others. Meta might make nice noises about ActivityPub while they're the underdog to Twitter but you could see them rapidly change their tune if Twitter went under.
I'm surprised I don't hear as much of "I wan't literally nothing to do with Meta in any way shape or form" sentiment (which happens to be my feelings on the matter).
Federation is the most interesting thing thats happened on the internet since http became the standard in my opinion, and I've been kicking around since Telnet, BBCs, IRC, Etc.
Meta doesn't want to play nice, they want to see if they can own everything, in my opinion. "Oh, people are doing this cool thing that we can't yet monitize and make our shareholders richer? See if we can somehow assimilate it, at a loss at first, as ususal of course."
I'm not sure about embrace, extend, extinguish, but it does sound like it'd be the way here. Either way, why the living fuck can we not have anything interconnected that a megacorp can't decide they'll take over? Why can't we keep that from happening, even when small independent individuals are running the server?
The entire point of ActivityPub is that it's open and EEE-proof. If the users leave it for something proprietary but better, then it isn't EEE, it's just a better product.
Simply being open source is not an achievement in itself. The platform has to be user friendly, stable and future-proof. Most FOSS and federated alternatives create a platform and then endlessly harp on federation like that's the end. No, that's the beginning. The point is to make a product better than Big Tech WHILE maintaining federation and Foss status. THAT is what makes a platform EEE proof.
If the users leave it for something proprietary but better, then it isn’t EEE, it’s just a better product.
That's literally the second E, extend.
Nothing is EEE-proof. If Meta puts even just 10 billion dollars into developing and marketing their fediverse EEE project, it's going to be better for the average user (I.e: billions of people already using Meta's services) than what a couple of FOSS devs made for free in their spare time.
That's not what extend means in this context. In this context, extend means to add non-standard features to the protocol which only your implementation understands.
If they embrace ActivityPub and then start adding their own proprietary features that are enough for users to switch over, and Mastodon doesn't, then it's not an "evil agenda", it's Meta adding an essential feature that the users want and Mastodon isn't able to add and ultimately Meta making a better product.
If Mastodon or Lemmy are truly superior and the future, then the product should be the best in the market, not DUE to federation but DESPITE it.
That's one thing that everyone here forgets because right now federation is hard to get into, and the only people here are those who put the effort in because they believe in federation. That is the reason for their tolerance in an inferior product. But if that's the case, then it will never be mainstream as long as the product is inferior.
ActivityPub is open source. This means, by definition, Meta are allowed to use it. They could easily do the extinguish part by just never using the protocol. If another platform existing is such a threat to the Fediverse then we're doomed to failure in the first place.
While Google removing XMPP no doubt helped sink nails into the coffin, WhatsApp played a bigger role in the death of XMPP than Google removing it from Talk. It was increasingly irrelevant for a now growing number of people.
The point of "embrace, extend, extinguish" is primarily to get rid of any potential future competition. So, for example, it would not work if Facebook tried to do it with Twitter since the latter already reached critical mass and can stand on its own without outside help, barring bad leadership. It typically only works if the party that's being "embraced" is smaller than the company that's "embracing".
To your point of ActivityPub being open source: that's true, so Meta is, legally speaking, free to use it. However, barring any restrictions in the license, they're also free to add any proprietary features to Threads that don't work on Mastodon. It's similar to Google Chrome: Google has their open-source Chromium web browser, but they also have a version called Chrome that has features that are not open-source.
The thing with Wine is that, from what I understand, it was made to help Windows software run on Linux. From the beginning, its primary intention was to help Linux users. Facebook's primary intention is to get more money. If they believe extinguishing Mastodon will further that goal, they'll do it. Unfortunately, I don't believe Mastodon is big enough to make Thread users think they'll be missing any significant amount of content if Facebook removed ActivityPub support.
Makes sense. People are thirsty for a something along the lines of "Twitter, but fewer nazis", so tons of people checked it out, but it still lacks feature parity with Twitter since it was a rushed-to-market MVP.
I think once it adds on a handful of new features, it's only a matter of time before audiences gravitate to Threads over a platform whose owner is bragging about funnelling money to human traffickers.
