Paul Cantrell
There’s a story we all should remember about what can happen when a corporate monolith decides to co-opt a decentralized open network.
It’s the story of first Compuserve, then AOL, then Microsoft trying to absorb the World Wide Web.
Remember: Microsoft originally launched MSN as a •competitor• to the Internet. Then they tried to embrace and extend it.
TL;DR: The Internet ate them all
Paul Cantrell
Yes, this is a subtoot about Threads.
No, I do not trust FB / Meta. Not one inch. Of all the tech giants, they are the most horrifically amoral.
No, I do not advocate taking anything for granted.
I’m just asking everyone to take a moment, just a quiet moment, to let go of the panic and the line-drawing and wonder:
Paul Cantrell
What would it look like for federation eat Facebook’s lunch?
People assume it will be the other way around. I do not take that for granted. Just ask AOL.
Paul Cantrell
One specific thought on that:
Folks are worried about whether to federate Threads. I tend to think that’s a red herring. Essentially all the data they can slurp from federation is already public.
I think the bright line to watch is how they prevent federated account migration off of Threads. •That• is where Threads will — must — break the federation social contract.
If we do an end run to make •that• workable…well! But then it’s barely workable now even on friendly instances, so…¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Paul Cantrell
What I actually think will happen:
Lots of fuss and noise, then an unresolved detente for a while, then Threads starts getting widely defederated not for ideological anti-Meta reasons but for •moderation• reasons — and vice versa, as Meta realizes it can’t moderate other instances — and it eventually all fizzles because that headache is just not worth Meta’s time and money, it leads nowhere and they never really needed it in the first place.
Paul Cantrell
What I wish would happen:
A bunch of the people who’ve been scared off of Mastodon by UX / growing pains / reply guys / lack of massive Mastodon PR budget and feel more comfortable going with Thread because big tech feels safe end up following and coming to value other fedi accounts — then jump to another instance when Meta pulls some BS because they don’t want to lose the connections they’ve come to value.
Paul Cantrell
Meta’s secret weapon in this fight: OSS projects tend toward sucking at UX, and for all the amazing improvements it’s made, Mastodon still struggles on this front. This is a senselessly high-friction environment. We lose a whooooole lot of people in the first 3 minutes.
Fedi’s secret weapon in this fight: Giant corporations are almost inconceivably wasteful and stupid. They make preposterous mistakes and have short attention spans. Only deep pockets let them survive their own nonsense.
Paul Cantrell
For those of you concerned about and genuinely looking to understand that first part about UX and Mastodon, I cannot recommend highly enough this research and writeup from @kissane, who did the radically thing of •actually listening to people•: https://erinkissane.com/mastodon-is-easy-and-fun-except-when-it-isnt
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.