Mastodon founder touts Threads' federation, makes it 'a more attractive option'

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/14/mastodon-founder-touts-threads-federation-saying-it-makes-his-x-rival-a-far-more-attractive-option/

by hn1986 • 3 years ago

18 11 3 years ago

techcrunch.com

verdverm2• 3 years ago

I'm going to deploy an ActivityPub server this weekend on the Threads news, probably a different implementation, but we'll see

I stopped using Twitter a few weeks back. I tried to give Elon the benefit of the doubt early on, turned out to be a mistake. The platform has become worse and worse. Eschewing moderation leads to hate, misinformation, bickering, and spam becoming the predominant content.

Federation seems like the right way to organize social media. Problem has always been the big servers each having their own protocol and not providing interoperability.

Also, I want way more control of my feed

hn1986• 3 years ago

Please provide an update on how challenging that is to deploy!

verdverm2• 3 years ago

I'll post it to the new instance and share

I'm leaning towards https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial

dawnerd• 3 years ago

I run my own with a few people and it’s really not that hard if you’re comfortable with docker.

CM30• 3 years ago

He's right. The issue we have right now is that many people stick with Twitter/X because it's the most convenient way to keep in contact with the folks they know. This is harder to do on its successors, because they're split three ways between Mastodon, Threads and BlueSky (and many more with lesser known platforms and services).

So people either use Twitter/X as a backup, or get stuck splitting their time between all these different platforms. Having at least two of them be interoperable will mean there's more of a chance of being able to follow all your friends/connections via one profile and piece of software, and less of an incentive to fall back to the old system.

Aqueous• 3 years ago

While I don’t doubt that Threads addition of ActivityPub is good for both Threads and the fediverse, I wonder if it will become federated in the sense that email is still federated, which is to say email is dominated by a small number of players who control the vast majority of email addresses (i.e gmail) and their control represents a de-facto centralization of a once decentralized protocol. Is there a reason to think that ActivityPub is fundamentally different from SMTP, and Threads from Gmail, to suggest that won’t happen here?

It’s still preferable to have an open protocol, but only slightly if the related market is monopolized.

RockRobotRock2• 3 years ago

Seems overly cynical to me.

apitman2• 3 years ago

I think it's a fair question. The primary reason email has centralized is spam. The fediverse doesn't have any specific answer to this. It explicitly punts in the spec[0].

Personally, I wonder how much value there is in NxN communication where N=8,000,000,000. If your instance only downloaded and showed you content from feeds you explicitly followed, spam would be a much smaller problem. But everyone wants to see responses from everyone else and yell at each other.

Email certainly provides value in being able to cold-contact someone, but I think that could be handled separately, maybe using something like a cost-based anti-spam system[1].

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#security-spam

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost-based_anti-spam_systems

Mastodon founder touts Threads' federation, makes it 'a more attractive option'

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