Why people keep defending Meta/Threads?

Threads does not need to steal people from the Fediverse. We are minuscule compared to Threads in just one day. Threads already has more content and engagement then us. They do not care about the Fediverse, they do not care about stealing people from the Fediverse. At most, the only reason they want to “support” it is because it makes them look good compared to the apocalyptic hellfire that is currently Twitter.

Good boy points are way more valuable to Meta than actual Fediverse users. They’re after Twitter users, not a small group of hardcore tech anarchists.

Meta: We're launching it now with no ads or plans, then we'll figure out what to do once we hit a billion users

People: Ooh but Meta may not be all bad, let's just wait and see!

I mean, Meta is totally freely admitting they're just playing the good guy now and will hit hard once they gain monopoly and can do whatever the fuck they want. How much more clear does it have to get?

People defend it because they actually like the instagram culture and they don’t dislike the data collection. So they see our staunch opposition as a condemnation of the things they like and they get defensive. Some are bootlickers too, who just love defending corporate actions for some reason.

Oppress me harder, daddy!

Threads is going to break into our federation and then ruin any conversations and topics we can talk about with just sheer volume of users. Lemmy is nice because we don't have meta or reddits algorithms optimising for propaganda, censorship and outrage. Its nice to talk about corporate corruption or random things instead of pointless garbage that gets spammed on tv. I want organic content. Anything corporations touch turns to shit, this instance is dead unless it preemptively defederates.

https://lemmy.world/post/1179031

It's not that complicated.

Threads is another instance that brings people to the Fediverse, and people like the idea that they can stay on their instances while still interacting with the world at large. For many people, having everyone on the Fediverse is the goal, and in fact, is a long-term goal of most of the platforms - the "Fediverse" is not meant to be a sort of closed community only for marginalised people to get away from the corporate web, it's for everyone to use in whatever way they see fit.

There is literally nothing more to discuss if you're wondering why people "defend" Threads.

Remember half the population voted for Trump. Half the people out there are dumbasses that are not informed about something before they think speak

The average person just doesn’t care. If the app works and they can see memes and connect with their friends they’re happy with it. They don’t care about data collection or the fediverse or any of that stuff. And I’m not saying this to imply that they’re stupid or anything like that. Just different priorities. All this stuff just literally doesn’t matter to them.

Defederating won't do jack shit to meta, they can still view your content and view data to their hearts content

All defederating does is stop you within your instance being able to see posts from Threads

The two things Meta likely cares about is content and data, both of which they can still get

Because some of them don't see the danger of Threads. And I'm not only talking about the EEE tactic: I'm also talking about the festering sludge that will grow on Threads and that you have also seen. For the Fediverse, it will be a moderation nightmare. And be sure that Zucc won't even moderate his platform; he doesn't want to and, as far as he's concerned, it's even out of his range.

Think about it this way: if a user starts spewing death threats within the Threads platform, he MAY get sanctioned. Not banned, "sanctioned". But if he does that to the Fediverse and especially on servers with already overwhelmed moderators, do you think that there would be consequences coming from Zucc for doing this kind of stuff outside the official Threads servers? No, nothing! Our moderators would surely ban him if they would find out about this in time, but imagine thousands of these kinds of accounts invading from Threads doing this constantly. This is not just Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but it gets to Embrace, Raid, Harass, Extinguish

I don't think people are defending it, they just think it's not that big a deal, it really is tho.

I think more than anything, this has shown the insecurity of ActivityPub for me. The whole point of federation is to get everyone on a decentralized platform that is aimed at 'copying' data. But there's no reason that data needs to be unencrypted in plaintext. We should theoretically be very open to wanting to federate with a large new community, but the issue lies with ActivityPub. Because we can't trust ActivityPub, we can't trust Meta. So are we implying that we imperially trust the services we currently use? I think this should be opening a conversation about ActivityPub security, not 'how quickly can we defederate from Meta to avoid the security issues', we should be looking at options for resolving those security issues. End to end encryption is in absolute must. We should want to add and federate more users into the ecosystem without fear of where they're data is coming from and where our is going to. So I'm not 'for' federation of Threads, I'm against defederation for 'security purposes' when everything is already so insecure. Fix the root problem, not these work around solutions.

I don't think people are intentionally defending Meta/Threads, so much as saying, "This is where my friends & communities are, so this is what I'm using." They may not like Meta/Threads or the like, if they even give them much thought, but they like their friends/communities/content that are on their platforms more than they dislike the platform owners/operators.

They're not really normies or stupid or whatever negative category you may want to put them in, they're just everyday folks for whom their social platforms are low priority in terms of consideration/reflection. Is what they want there? Yes. Does it work reliably? Yes. If it ticks those boxes that's all that probably concerns them.

Should they give it further consideration? Most of us here would probably argue yes, but we're not about to change their minds by pestering them about it or insulting them for their decisions.

My only use for Twitter was the mainstream stuff like service updates, official announcements, and sports reporting. Mastadon is never going to be mainstream. Mastadon will always have instances without meta for the whatever the fuck else you'd use it for now.

You can make the most user friendly website ever but nobody is going to use it if it doesn't have the content they like, and "All the same content with no ads and an app with more privacy" is a pretty easy sell.

It should be the users choice to block Threads, not the federation. What does Meta loose in getting defederated, they're already able to scrape like everyone else, you're just going to inconvenience users wanting an alternative. Some people want to see thread posts while also avoiding the data hell Meta is. Mastodon is a great way to do that and because of this will gain tons of users. Defederating will only gain meta more users since it took away the alternative option. Not everyone cares about the ecosystem like Facebook and Instagram but love twitter and need that addiction fix. The very small amount of users on mastodon will not make a dent in the profits of Meta at all.

Please read Eugen Rotchko's thoughts and approach to threads.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

Does threads even plan to federate at all? I haven't looked that deeply into it. They may have just used AP because its open source so it was easy to spin up a twitter clone. I could very well be wrong about that.

The arguments about "hanging out with my friends" is valid, but also consider all the other organizations that probably will never consider using something like Mastodon. Will the bands I like, restaraunts in my area, politicians, etc join Mastodon? Maybe, but not all of them. Federation would allow me to follow my favorite bar and see what shows they have this week without me having to use threads myself.

When it comes to the damage Threads could do to the fediverse, I think thay has way more to do with how the fediverse reacts to changes that Threads may implement on their own. Considering the discussion all over fedi about Threads and whether or not to defederate, why the hell would the Activity Pub devs cater to potential breakages that Threads introduces? If Threads breaks compatibility with the Fediverse, then they will have effectively defederated themselves.

Ultimately it comes down to content. Threads may want to take our content and throw ads next to it, and that's fine if they chose to do that. Some of us may want content that originates on Threads while using a foss client.

If we chose to completely defederate from Threads, I think that will ultimately push users from the fediverse to meta. I hate facebook, but that's where my family is. I can't even convince my wife to ditch reddit for lemmy. They will scrape our data whether or not we like it, and whether or not we defederate. I honestly just don't see the point. As long as we don't allow meta to have too much say in how Activity Pub is developed, I don't really see the harm.

I talked to this one pro-Meta federation person yesterday who was really hung up on the fact that they'd be able to hang out with their Meta friends on a more privacy aware fediverse app. I tried to explain how EEE would work in the context of lemmy, and how their privacy dream is all a moot point because Meta will inevitably kill the fediverse and force them to Threads in the end, but the other person just kept going "yeah yeah, I get that... but if we federate, then I'll be able to hang out with my Meta friends."

I don't know, they just had tunnel vision about being able to hang out with their friends, or were in the denial stage of grief about EEE or something.

I think federating isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the worst case Meta will remove ActivityPub from Threads in the future. Threads federating is an opportunity for regular people to see and understand the Fediverse, and we get to see the more mainstream influencers. If it turns out Threads has malicious intent, defederate and hopefully the backlash will get thread users to migrate to another federated instance.

I have set up a Mastodon account and love the concept but feel like its mostly anonymous twitter. Reddit and Lemmy do a much better job of providing a platform for mostly anonymous interaction than twitter, which has always been successful for its ability to allow regular people to follow/interact with more public people, which Mastodon is mostly lacking. If those more public people move to threads and if the activitypub integration works well, I would be able to use Mastodon to follow the people I follow on Twitter and get rid of twitter while using a privacy honoring instance and that would make the use case for Mastodon much stronger. I understand the concerns with EEE and don't intend to set up a threads account, but it seems like if Mastodon is going to get extinguished by Meta defederating is not really going to impact it much... They can still extend the capability to pull people away.

Because people can have differing opinions from you?