Patrick
🧵 [1 / 10]
Let's say, #Meta comes true to its promise and federates #Threads via #ActivityPub. What would keep celebrities and other influencers from fleeing #Zuckerberg 's walled garden in troves?
If you make it big on Corporate Social Media, i.e. you attract new users to the platform and produce ad friendly content, then CSE has an interest in keeping you big and good things are going to happen:
Mastodon Migration
@raccoon Because they won't just "federate". Whatever they do will be some hybrid nonsense. You won't be able to do what you are imagining.
Patrick
🧵 [10 / 10]
Eventually, the celebrity will want to publish something and that's another 1m notifications (14 hours) PER POST, he expects to be delivered to all of his followers, hogging a major amount of processing power and bandwidth in the process.
Meta knows how inefficient ActivityPub is at scale and that's why they are not overly concerned with big accounts fleeing their platform. There's very little to gain and much to loose from that.
Patrick
🧵 [9 / 10]
when the celebrity in question happens to be logged in during migration - fun things happen in that case).
Some people might object here, pointing out, that with the help of a tech team, you can migrate 1m followers much faster and that's correct, but the real trouble starts afterwards.
Patrick
🧵 [8 / 10]
The reason for this is that ActivityPub has no concept of migrating accounts. This is a Mastodon extension and it is horribly inefficient at scale: when you migrate your account, your old instance sends your followers a notification to unsubscribe and resubscribe to the new place. Sending those notifications will take around 14h, during which the new place will basically experience a DDOS attack (especially,
Patrick
🧵 [7 / 10]
Here's the thing: no Mastodon admin will want a 1m followers celebrity to migrate to his instance and no 1m followers celebrity can migrate to a Mastodon instance without the help of its admin. If you are this big, you pretty much need to run your own instance.
Patrick
🧵 [6 / 10]
Mastodon is not build on ICMP, but HTTPS over TCP/IP. It takes several packages, to resolve the IP address of a webserver, establish a TCP connection and download its SSL certificate. For ease of use, let's assume an average connection setup time of 40ms before you can send any actual HTTP requests and 10ms to make the request (note: several HTTP requests can be send over an established connection). So in the worst case, we end up with 50ms to get something from a server.
Patrick
🧵 [5 / 10]
Quick refresher on how the internet works:
Your operation system comes with a command called "ping". It sends an ICMP echo message to another host on the internet and measures the time it takes to get a reply. Typically, a round trips take between 5 and 15 milliseconds.
Patrick
🧵 [4 / 10]
If an influencer wanted to migrate from Threads into Fedi, two things would happen:
1. Meta no longer has an incentive to promote him or his content
2. Meta will no longer lie for him
In other words, his follower count would tank hard, crashing down to his organic/active audience. That's a scary thought for someone whose livelihood depends on bullshitting advertisers. Which brings us to the fun part of this thread (and likely the real reason why Threads isn't federated, yet).
Patrick
🧵 [3 / 10]
The important thing about this "bigness" however is: the numbers on CSE are inflated. If you have 1m followers, your actual reach is just a fraction of that. CSE will generously count bots, inactive & duplicate accounts towards your audience, while not guaranteeing that your content is really shown to all your subscribers. Everyone knows that the numbers are fake, but due to deliberate intransparency, CSE & influencers gets away with them.
Patrick
🧵 [2 / 10]
* You will be able to talk to humans ("community managers") in case of problems.
* The platform will turn a blind eye when you violate community guidelines
* Your content gets promoted by the platform
Erin Conroy
Ah, interesting. Is this likely why it takes a little bit of time for the "follows you" to appear when you click on a mutual's profile?
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