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Threads and the Fediverse | Kev Quirk
(kevquirk.com)
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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Fediverse
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Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".
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I simply want the Fediverse to be a proper alternative option for social media access, not just another secret nerd club. We have enough of those already. That requires not completely closing off access to the things the typical person will want to access. I want all social media to eventually be interoperable like email is, preferably on the ActivityPub standard and not whatever centralized bullshit BlueSky is trying to cook up. That is the only way we're going to break the corporate stranglehold on social media.
Put simply, if you make people choose between our platform and the large corporate-backed platform with orders of magnitude more users, they will choose the corporate platform almost every time. And I think that's a bad outcome for all involved.
If it was almost any other corporation I'd be willing to give them a chance. If Tumblr actually launches ActivityPub I doubt many people will complain. The fact that it's Facebook though makes it pretty much a non-starter imo.
It's just a non starter cause you declare it a non starter?
For me personally with my instance, yes
It's Meta. Why even attempt to let them? What event in their history makes anyone go, "oh, yeah, that would be good."
The only difference between Tumblr and Facebook is size. Facebook isn't uniquely evil; it does exactly what any corporation would do at that scale. The systems that molded Facebook into what it is would also mold Tumblr or anything else into the same abomination.
I would respect principled opposition to megacorps even if I think it's still misguided in this instance, because at least that's overall based. But all of the discourse focuses on the specific wrongdoings of Facebook as if any other corporation wouldn't have done exactly the same thing in their position. It feels very kneejerk.
I want to federate and use it to destroy their platform. The biggest problem with the periodic social media "migrations" that always fail is that it creates a fragmented diaspora. Take Twitter as an example. When the big migration off Twitter was supposed to happen, some went to the Fediverse, some went to Threads, some went to BlueSky.
You know what happened? After a few weeks, most of them went back to Twitter, because that was the only common place between them, where they knew they could all meet and communicate. If Twitter was forced to federate with all other platforms, it would have been snuffed out by now. But if that was even proposed, everybody would have a kneejerk reaction, because Twitter bad. Nobody is thinking of the big picture.
You’re describing the ideal you want in a perfectly spherical fediverse in a vacuum. You have to consider the very real labor and server costs needed to maintain & moderate an instance that gets flooded by the content of corporate juggernauts.
We have chosen; that’s why we’re here. Others are welcome to make the same choice when they’re ready.