Starting a test where posts from Threads accounts will be available on Mastodon and other services that use the ActivityPub protocol. Making Threads interoperable will give people more choice over how they interact and it will help content reach more people. I'm pretty optimistic about this.
I have my problems with Meta, but I’m hoping this will help Mastodon grow
To all the people wondering about metas intentions in this it’s not the big bad corporation taking down the upstart competition. All the people saying it’s EEE can’t show any sign metas doing this or even wants to because the strategy doesn’t work, any time a company does it it either doesn’t take off or they get brought up on anti-trust laws. Show me a standard that was destroyed by EEE and I’ll show you a standard that never took off in the first place. All the usual examples given, email, java, html, remain open standards to this day.
The truth is the fediverse isn’t competition to meta, it’s a fraction of the size and is populated by users who would never use meta services in the first place. They can pretend it’s a competitor though. If twitter does actually collapse and people switch to threads meta will face anti-trust suits for owning the three largest social media platforms. If they add activity pub support though they can point to the fediverse and say it’s competition, even if it’s only 1 % of the platform. They also have to deal with EU interoperability laws that might start getting enforced.
TL;DR this is about compliance for meta, not conquest.
Email an open standard? Sure, on the surface it is. Running your own mail server and getting your emails delivered to gmail/outlook users? Good luck.
Who cares what the form is, if the substance is the problem?
Same with web. To this day, nobody besides google has the possibility to compete in the browser space. So much shit was added to the web standards, that you need an incredible amount of resources to produce a modern browser engine (I am talking one that users can use for their daily stuff, not lynx). You have chrome, you have all the chromium clones, you have Firefox which is anyway paid by google, and you have safari. Period.
Can confirm, my mail server does just about everything I found it needs to do to not get flagged spam. And it doesn’t except for Gmail. Not even Microsoft has “Spam” filters that strict beyond checking the basic records.
On the browsers, I think in large parts Google should have never been allowed to push for their own Browser in their own products simply because the have monopolies in so many of them. Free market this and that, IRL it doesn’t work without some regulations and imo (American) Tech companies have been allowed too much freedom to abuse the market whichever way they like.
Absolutely. Your email has an image? Maybe spam. Your email does not have an unsubscribe link, even if has nothing to do with transactional emails? Spam. Your email is from an address or domain which did not send many emails before? Spam.
It feels the meme from parks and recreation.
And you can’t reliably even know if your message was received or not, the only way to do that is asking directly through some other channel…so the fact that email is open is essentially just an empty quality.
The platform never really took off. It was a niche messaging platform before Facebook and Google and went back to being one after they left. I have yet to see any evidence that Google or Facebook helped or hurt xmpp, just speculation and anger that it didn’t take off.
> make a new messenger using a niche protocol
> new users choose your messenger because it is objectively the best after you dumped unreasonable amounts of cash into it
> userbase grows, in large parts because the small messenger is interoperable so you can say “hey, if other company wanted to they could just implement [protocol] for you, we are already doing that”
> once userbase reaches critical mass, pull the plug on the protocol
> users with long chat histories and contact books are now more or less stuck on your platform whether they like it or not because getting people to switch suddenly means two messengers instead of one for them, not a good proposition to make.
XMPP did take off while it was in Messenger, Facebook decided to kill it with its superior reach because it was a step-ladder rather than something actually useful to them.
Facebook will absolutely use the Mastodon interoperability as a marketing trick “Hey guys, if you have friends that don’t like threads they can use another platform and still talk with you”. They’ll use it to distinguish threads from twitter until they feel like they don’t need it anymore. Then they’ll find some sort of technical excuse and pull the plug on ActivityPub support.
then they’ll find some sort of technical excuse and pull the plug on ActivityPub support
How do they do this without running a foul of regulators? People are already mad at meta and want to break them up for having instagram and Facebook, if they add the last big social media platform every politician right and left will be lining up to take them down. There’s a reason they never bought twitter despite being able to 10x over. Combine that with new EU interoperability laws and there’s no way meta could get away with that.
To all the people wondering about metas intentions in this it’s not the big bad corporation taking down the upstart competition. All the people saying it’s EEE can’t show any sign metas doing this or even wants to because the strategy doesn’t work, any time a company does it it either doesn’t take off or they get brought up on anti-trust laws. Show me a standard that was destroyed by EEE and I’ll show you a standard that never took off in the first place. All the usual examples given, email, java, html, remain open standards to this day.
The truth is the fediverse isn’t competition to meta, it’s a fraction of the size and is populated by users who would never use meta services in the first place. They can pretend it’s a competitor though. If twitter does actually collapse and people switch to threads meta will face anti-trust suits for owning the three largest social media platforms. If they add activity pub support though they can point to the fediverse and say it’s competition, even if it’s only 1 % of the platform. They also have to deal with EU interoperability laws that might start getting enforced.
TL;DR this is about compliance for meta, not conquest.
Email an open standard? Sure, on the surface it is. Running your own mail server and getting your emails delivered to gmail/outlook users? Good luck.
Who cares what the form is, if the substance is the problem?
Same with web. To this day, nobody besides google has the possibility to compete in the browser space. So much shit was added to the web standards, that you need an incredible amount of resources to produce a modern browser engine (I am talking one that users can use for their daily stuff, not lynx). You have chrome, you have all the chromium clones, you have Firefox which is anyway paid by google, and you have safari. Period.
Can confirm, my mail server does just about everything I found it needs to do to not get flagged spam. And it doesn’t except for Gmail. Not even Microsoft has “Spam” filters that strict beyond checking the basic records.
On the browsers, I think in large parts Google should have never been allowed to push for their own Browser in their own products simply because the have monopolies in so many of them. Free market this and that, IRL it doesn’t work without some regulations and imo (American) Tech companies have been allowed too much freedom to abuse the market whichever way they like.
Absolutely. Your email has an image? Maybe spam. Your email does not have an unsubscribe link, even if has nothing to do with transactional emails? Spam. Your email is from an address or domain which did not send many emails before? Spam.
It feels the meme from parks and recreation.
And you can’t reliably even know if your message was received or not, the only way to do that is asking directly through some other channel…so the fact that email is open is essentially just an empty quality.
@sudneo @fediverse spamcop.net
XMPP says hi.
The platform never really took off. It was a niche messaging platform before Facebook and Google and went back to being one after they left. I have yet to see any evidence that Google or Facebook helped or hurt xmpp, just speculation and anger that it didn’t take off.
“it’s not embrace-extended-extinguish. Facebook and Google merely adopted it, increased its reach, and then made it irrelevant.”
> make a new messenger using a niche protocol > new users choose your messenger because it is objectively the best after you dumped unreasonable amounts of cash into it > userbase grows, in large parts because the small messenger is interoperable so you can say “hey, if other company wanted to they could just implement [protocol] for you, we are already doing that” > once userbase reaches critical mass, pull the plug on the protocol > users with long chat histories and contact books are now more or less stuck on your platform whether they like it or not because getting people to switch suddenly means two messengers instead of one for them, not a good proposition to make.
XMPP did take off while it was in Messenger, Facebook decided to kill it with its superior reach because it was a step-ladder rather than something actually useful to them. Facebook will absolutely use the Mastodon interoperability as a marketing trick “Hey guys, if you have friends that don’t like threads they can use another platform and still talk with you”. They’ll use it to distinguish threads from twitter until they feel like they don’t need it anymore. Then they’ll find some sort of technical excuse and pull the plug on ActivityPub support.
How do they do this without running a foul of regulators? People are already mad at meta and want to break them up for having instagram and Facebook, if they add the last big social media platform every politician right and left will be lining up to take them down. There’s a reason they never bought twitter despite being able to 10x over. Combine that with new EU interoperability laws and there’s no way meta could get away with that.