I only partly live under a rock, so I’ve now heard that the Facebooks is making Threads, and it’ll talk to Mastodon.
Any idea how to keep them from taking over? Apparently, you’re a weirdo these days if you use Firefox, Brave/Qwant, and trust FLOSS > proprietary.
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Threads will only talk to Mastodon et al. for as long as the protocol remains compatible and servers allow it to federate. My guess is that one or the other of those things won’t be true for long.
If your real question is, why do so many people like Threads better than the Fediverse? Well, the answer is that most people don’t want to think about how to sign up and find stuff—they just want to click a button and have all their decisions made for them. Federation is not a selling point for the average non-technical user who just wants stuff to be easy. And that leads to two more questions.
First of all, does the Fediverse want to attract these non-technical users?
If the answer to that is “yes”, how can they be encouraged to join up and stick around? The answer to that is, hide federation, which requires a few things. First of all, offer a default server on sign-up (to avoid overloading a single node, this should be chosen randomly from a list of general-purpose instances that are uncongested at sign-up time, as someone else already suggested). Making it easier to migrate an account between servers would help a lot.
The other thing is that there needs to be some kind of usable list of things to follow—people, hashtags, lemmy and kbin communities, or whatever is pertinent to that corner of the Fediverse—built into the interface, not off somewhere on a third-party site whose lists may include things on a server yours isn’t federated with, and offering the ability to subscribe without doing any copy-and-pasting. Ideally this directory should offer more methods than just keyword search or scanning everything on the list one item at a time for discoverability.
For Lemmy, these things could all be done through changes to join-lemmy.org and the default front end, plus some elbow grease to create and populate a browsable community index arranged by topic, in a form that can be easily passed around. I expect the requirements for other parts of the Fediverse are similar, but haven’t looked in detail.
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The best way is going to constantly remind people that there’s alternative ways to see the same content.
Because most people are used to centralization and never ask themselves if there’s different ways to access the same content.
Even on Reddit, where third-party apps were wildly popular, most users were still shocked third-party apps were a thing, and many didn’t understand why someone would even want that.
It’s not gonna work unless there’s prominent users with loads of followers around to remind people it works more like email addresses than plain Threads handles.
https://fedipact.online/ for one, but it’s important to realize Facebook isn’t the only company that tries to pull embrace, extend, extinguish. Even lemmy.ml or mastodon.social (being by far the most popular instances in their networks) are vulnerable to compromise. It’s up to the users to distribute themselves across enough instances that one individual instance can’t call the shots.
Also it would seem worthwhile not to create all the communities on just the most popular instances. Distribute the communities around too.
Edit: this comment changed my mind. In a nutshell, if we can’t keep a large instance controlled by “the enemy” from destroying what we’ve got, then we just have to do better next time.
Threads or whatever Meta might introduce is just a specific example of the problem with a controlling instance.
Bitcoin has to take steps to avoid a 51% attack lest the whole thing come crashing down.
Condo buyers have to make sure they are not buying into something where the developer keeps over half of the units as rentals in order to control the board.
I think the fediverse has to also guard against any one instance hosting too large a fraction of users. I’m not sure that it even takes being as big as half the users. I’m not sure what a critical mass would be, but I’m sure that a large enough instance could “go critical.”
i saw a quote today which said the grass is always greener where you water it; so i suppose, you should keep engaging with the federated communities you want to support. After all, Meta wants engagment so chose not to engage with what you dont believe in
It would help if the onboarding experience was smoother. Perhaps suggesting the ‘best’ instance based on speed, and if there are several randomize between the less popular instances. For normal people having to read about what an instance is and how to choose one will be a another barrier to entry, perhaps a deal breaker.
Each instance should probably have a 2 to 4 sentence summary (maybe 240 character limit lol) that could be included there so people could easily compare the philosophy of those recommendations if they care to read it.
Mastodon is confusing. Facebook will make an implementation that’s more approachable. If FLOSS wants to win, it needs to be more approachable. Will they?
I don’t think so. FLOSS devs never seem to attract FLOSS designers. I’d love to collab with them, but they all seem to like designing not-FLOSS things.
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Well the coorporations have always used/misused FOSS tech. Take Chromium and VSCode as an example.
This is exactly what is going to happen, you will not be able to separate proprietary crap from FOSS and it will be applied to fediverse in the same manner.
But there is a silver lining, all this will have a side-effect of normies knowing a lot about fediverse (for better or worse).
Defederating is something at least. But in reality like all societal problems stemming from late stage capitalism, the only true answers are extremely illegal
Who said we’re in late stage capitalism? If you ask the libertarians, we’ve been out of any sincere capitalism since WWII.
