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.
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.
Absolutely not
I was never on Twitter, why join that cesspit now?
It depends. How much porn are we talking?
LOL.
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.
After reading this very thread, one thing is clear: People simply don’t trust Meta, for good reason.
But I’m still, perhaps naively, hopeful that this one could be the platform to pivot the decentralised social web approach to the masses.
Also, a funny scenario: What if you wait it out until enough people follow you on Threads, then take all your followers and transfer over to a Mastodon instance? I may do that, actually.
There’s definitely a trust issue. ActivityHub doesn’t fundamentally change that unfortunately - Meta would still see everything I post or say, and can still build a profile on me if my posts are visible in their app. You bring up an interesting thought though - my understanding is that ActivityHub would make migration to other platforms easier… even migrations off first party apps, if a Digg/Reddit/Twitter-style event occurred? Might help prevent some of the tomfoolery we’re seeing now.
Or I’m also naive, I guess we’ll find out.
As far as I understand that’s correct. I’ve got a solid junior level understand of programming LOL but ActivityPub acts as an interface basically where instead of the content being walled off to Instagram specifically this new Threads app should be accessible by the outside world (Mastadon, Lemmy, whatever else) through ActivityPub. Those apps would get the content through requests to the interface. So you could theoretically migrate your content just like you can on other Fediverse apps.
I’m right there hoping with you and I think this very well could be a big turning point as they’ll be the first major player, to my knowledge, to incorporate anything Fediverse into their ecosystem.
My other big hope is that the process of signing up for sites like Lemmy, Mastadon, and other Fediverse apps is improved so that more people can navigate it easily. As you said, right now the UX is pretty bad and can be frustrating even for veteran users of the internet. My biggest frustration, like many, when signing up for Mastadon was trying to choose a server and the way the Servers page is structured made it ten times more difficult I felt like because it’s just a giant list of servers that are sorted by category.
I think with a really great UX and simplified UI for the sign-up process that would go a long way to not turning people away. I imagine a literal walk through of the whole process, step by step, with lots of hand holding and tool-tips pointing to things in case someone gets confused.
I hear this a lot, but how do these people manage to find a doctor, or a car repair shop, or a garbage company,etc? It’s exactly as confusing or hard, which is to say not at all.
There’s no great easy hand holding for choosing a repair shop or doctor - you either look it up or go to the first one you find or a random one. Same works with the fediverse.
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.
I absolutely agree. I’d be super happy if mainstream corpos joined the fediverse just so I could reach my friends from a side I’m comfortable on. I still cannot understand why messengers like Whatsapp aren’t federated.
It’s Meta, you might as well ask ‘should the henhouse accept the fox’s invitation to a hearty banquet this evening?’
Hard pass. Meta doesn’t need any more of my data.
Meta LOL absolute No!
Yeah I thought this was a meme post, I feel like there’s maybe 1 person on this site who would actually want a meta twitter clone. That’s also a hard maybe
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.
Yeah. Facebook won’t be happy until it destroys humanity entirely.
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?
Meta has the capacity to make really evil products, let’s not start the EEE treadmill.
Yeah, I worry about that… Let’s see
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.
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.
I think the other way around is more likely. Their users having normal access in and out, but outsiders having limited access to Meta content. Going for the “exclusive club” vibe and making the users feel “special” will keep most of them in the garden.
