Notices by Patrick (raccoon@mastodon.world)

@connor

Thats a pretty complicated question to answer in 500 characters or less ;).

I had a couple of threads about that, now archived here:

https://fedimeister.onyxbits.de/topics/thread-archive-about-bluesky/

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Psst, did you hear? #Twitter traffic is tanking! Matthew Prince, CEO of #Cloudfare posted a graph proofing this!

🤦♂️

Ok, first things first: Twitter's traffic may very well (and even likely) be tanking, now that #Meta's #Threads is available, but this traffic graph is neither proof, nor derived from credible way of measuring this.

We need to talk...

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* 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

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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,

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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.

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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.

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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:

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Much overlooked fact: a social network is not just the number of people connected to it, but also the conversations that connect those people to each other.

Meta just dumped a ton of people into a public place and hopes that they will start interacting with each other on their own (basically by only giving the already big guys a megaphone and an audience to scream to).

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And here's the optimistic thought about the whole thing: what if Threads manages to draw enough people away from Twitter, so conversations come to a halt there, without being able to spark a flurry of conversations in its own yard, because the whole thing was grown fast, not organically?

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Here's the thing: Twitter is not doing well, Meta wants its userbase, but is late to the party. Mastodon and Bluesky already have a headstart, so Zuckerberg had his community managers canvas from door to door to get celebrities on board, federate with the fediverse and dumped a good portion of Instagram into his new service. All this, so Threads would not start and end as a ghost town.

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I'm currently digging through the code of the #Android #Threadsapp. I can't quite put the finger on why, but the whole thing feels like a rush job. There's several megabytes of test data in there that should not have made it into production and the binary looks mostly like they just dumped the entire #Facebook / #Instagram codebase into #Threads, regardless of what was needed and what is not.

Move fast and don't break things, right?

Well, it probably comes at no surprise to anyone, but the #Threads app requests the two system permissions

* RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED
* FOREGROUND_SERVICE

in AndroidManifest.xml

That is, it automatically gets started when the #Android device boots and it wants to be able to run without a GUI. In other words: if you want a moment of #privacy, you have to force close the app from the system settings.