Link to: https://www.threads.net/@mosseri/post/C01zMgWp4V-

Adam Mosseri:

Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.

  •  Tinkerings   ( @Tinkerings@beehaw.org ) 
    6•6 months ago

    The Wig punched himself through a couple of African backwaters and felt like a shark cruising a swimming pool thick with caviar. Not that any one of those tasty tiny eggs amounted to much, but you could just open wide and scoop, and it was easy and filling and it added up. The Wig worked the Africans for a week, incidentally bringing about the collapse of at least three governments and causing untold human suffering. At the end of his week, fat with the cream of several million laughably tiny bank accounts, he retired. As he was going out, the locusts were coming in; other people had gotten the African idea.

    • Count Zero - William Gibson

    They just need the data. It’s available, all they need to do is open wide and scoop.

    •  fer0n   ( @fer0n@lemm.ee ) OP
      11•6 months ago

      Maybe I’m not getting something here, but neither Mastodon nor Lemmy are private, you can find everything open for everyone already, so how would federation change something there? Federation doesn’t mean everyone would use their app, so they wouldn’t gain any app usage analytics.

      Also I don’t get how your metaphor make sense. The amount of fediverse users is a rounding error next to threads, instagram, WhatsApp and facebook. So there’s not a “lot a tiny things that can add up”, only a small amount of tiny things which don’t really add up to anything.

      •  Tinkerings   ( @Tinkerings@beehaw.org ) 
        6•6 months ago

        We’re pretty much agreeing here. I don’t think them federating out makes much of a difference. They get the data from the reverse for free. They only have to scoop, and it’s worth almost noting individually.

        But that’s their current game. Has been for a long time. Serving one ad is a tiny thing. But they add up.

        However, them wanting to federate indicates they see the fediverse as something worth noting and paying attention to, possibly even joining. That’s not nothing.

        They either think:

        1. The fediverse will grow with or without them, and without them it’s a potential threat, due to loss of control
        2. The fediverse has potential that they want to water and help grow so they can prune it and shape it to become something valuable to them
        3. They can “try genuinely” to join the fediverse, and elicit a response that maims it

        That response can come in many forms.

        If they provoke a backlash of defederation (done), that causes devision and argument. They win by shattering the potential threat before it can grow.

        If they are allowed to join and become a large voice and eventually be like gmail to email, big enough to have control and provide the filtering people are already (quietly, carefully) asking for. All they need to do is to offer “spam filters” and a “personal feed” and we have Facebook 2.0 and they don’t even have to foot most of the server bills.

        I’m not sure how to win this, but there’s a lot of ways to lose it.

        •  CanadaPlus   ( @CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org ) 
          5•6 months ago

          If they are allowed to join and become a large voice and eventually be like gmail to email, big enough to have control and provide the filtering people are already (quietly, carefully) asking for. All they need to do is to offer “spam filters” and a “personal feed” and we have Facebook 2.0 and they don’t even have to foot most of the server bills.

          I think this is inevitable, in part because serving is expensive, and now that we might get significant spammer activity, complicated. Carrying the analogy on, though, I have a Proton account and I can give it out in real life just the way I would a Gmail account. There is no such possibility with Twitter. They could try and put up a hard wall once they have enough buy-in, but that didn’t work so well for Yahoo mail, and hopefully it wouldn’t for Threads.

          So yeah, I expect I’ll be on a little instance somewhere, and I’ll still be able to participate in the equivalent of the Obama AMA hosted on one of the big ones.

        •  fer0n   ( @fer0n@lemm.ee ) OP
          4•6 months ago

          Sry, I‘m still not following. I don’t understand your argument, are you saying they want to federate to gain additional users to grab data from? Because I don’t think that’s going to be a significant amount of people.

          Most people don’t care about what makes the fediverse desirable to its current users, all it does is add friction to them and therefore I don’t see it growing much either.

          I think the reason why meta wants to federate is this:

          • it helps with anticompetitive arguments, because it’s “open” and not controlled by meta alone
          • some will refuse to use anything from meta, and threads users being able to communicate with them adds value
          • it won’t hurt meta, because the majority will be using their app anyways
          • it helps their image

          I don’t think they’re doing it to “get more data” or to “take over the fediverse”. There’s nothing worth taking over and they can probably get the data anyways, it’s all openly available. So it’s basically all upside and no downside for them.

          •  Tinkerings   ( @Tinkerings@beehaw.org ) 
            1•6 months ago

            If they thought the fediverse was insignificant they wouldn’t even bother. Them spending publicly visible time and energy on it means there’s something for them to gain.

            But yeah, I’m not entirely sure what yet. Like you said, reading data is freely available, so it’s not just that.

          •  tobbue   ( @tobbue@feddit.de ) 
            1•6 months ago

            What happens if you merge the user base of a small network and a huge network? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect Will the small network gain from the huge one or the other way round? Also there is a lot to gain. The users base of the fediverse and it’s infrastructure grew by 5x in the last two years: https://fedidb.org/ Meta has a big interest in extinguishing a competitor before it profits from the bandwagon effect.