Meta's rumoured Twitter competitor Threads has caused a stir in the Fediverse. Some suggesting fedi instances should preemptively block Threads, others willing to wait and see what happens. At the time of writing (June 2023) it is unclear how this will pan out. Many fear the threat of embrace, extend, extinguish, but others are excited at the prospect of the fediverse becoming more significant.
Meta: "MAY I JOIN YOU?"
By David Revoy
One of the oft-touted benefits of the fediverse is that it would be resilient to corporate enshittification. It will be interesting to see how the fediverse handles real threats.
Interesting Articles
Roelant Kooij wrote an excellent overview of the arguments on either side of this debate. The Fediverse Report also has a good timeline of the news. These are sorted in the order I have found them, with my strongest recommendations in bold.
- Not That Kind of ‘Open’, John Gruber on the debate
- suggests that the pre-emptive block may be "petty and deliberately insular"
- More on Preemptively Blocking Facebook’s Imminent ActivityPub Entry, John Gruber's follow-up
- suggests that if Facebook is federated, they should start with "two strikes against it"
- "Is the goal of the Fediverse to be anti-corporate/anti-commercial, or to be pro-openness? I think openness is the answer"
- How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse), Ploum's excellent writeup on how large companies can (sometimes maliciously) kill open/decentralised networks
- makes comparison to Google killing XMPP and Microsoft using OOXML to cripple open source office software
- ⭐️ Meta on the Fediverse: to block or not to block?, SciComm admins writeup of their balanced thought process on pre-emptive blocking
- they conclude to pre-emptively block, but leave the door open to unblocking if Meta is a decent fediverse citizen
- Why would Meta implement ActivityPub? 1½ reasons are compelling, another is not, Johannes Ernst's analysis of Meta's motivations
- suggests EEE is not worthwhile for Meta, far less important than appeasing incoming EU regulations
- Tim Chamber's (indieweb.social admin) First Time? series of posts on the matter
- Project92 and the Fediverse - A Smarter Battle Plan to Protect the Open Social Web
- suggests that pre-emptive defederation is not the most effective strategy to protect the current fediverse
- thinks current fediverse can win by providing a better experience, especially in areas where corporate interests conflict with this (e.g. advertising)
- Project92, the Fediverse: (First Time? Part 2)
- 'We have the tools to protect our people, and we are stronger to "Watch like a hawk, with our fingers over the block button."'
- Meta and the Fediverse (First Time? Part 3)
- generally calling for calming of vitriol, promoting compassion between disagreeing groups
- "All sides should admit we don’t know far more than we do know right now."
- Instagram Threads and the Fediverse (First Time? Part 4), a summation of all his previous posts
- Project92 and the Fediverse - A Smarter Battle Plan to Protect the Open Social Web
- ⭐️ The Two Camps of Mastodon, on the general split between people that view the fediverse as a collection of small communities and those that view it as a distributed network where most people can talk to most others in a decentralised fashion, and how Threads' existence exacerbate this divide
- The horns of a dilemma, Wendy M. Grossman enumerating potential futures
- ⭐️ Meta and the fediverse: sorting heat from light, a fantastic rebuke to many of Meta's alleged nefarious motivations
- meta gains little in terms of data collection ability since ActivityPub lacks privacy anyway, and what it does gain isn't very useful, and the current fediverse population size is not large enough to be worth pursuing for data collection
- its seems unlikely that Meta actually sees the fediverse as a threat
- the Gchat/XMPP embrace/extend/extinguish example is flawed
- Meta isn't evil without motivation
- "So why is Meta going to use ActivityPub? Here’s the thing; I haven’t the faintest fucking clue. It does not obviously help Meta in any way to have interoperability with ActivityPub"
- You’re So Vain, You Probably Think This App Is About You, an argument against the idea that Meta actually wants to EEE the fediverse
- suggests that there is little monetary reason to federate from Meta's perspective, other than regulatory pressure
- particularly posits that defederating from servers that refuse to defederate Meta is particularly short-sighted