I’m anxious but hopeful for this. I’ve left Twitter and enjoy Mastodon. I’d hate to see Meta destroy it, intentionally or not.<p>I want to believe federated systems can work even with extreme asymmetries in participants. I think if federated systems can’t, they’re forever doomed to obscurity.<p>Don’t get me wrong: obscurity has its benefits. Mastodon feels a lot like 2010 Twitter, and I love that. However I’d also love for federated systems to work for mainstream audiences.
I’m not really excited about this; Meta has no strong incentive to be a long term good neighbor in the fediverse, but plenty of incentive to engage in poor behavior. No matter how sincere or well meaning leadership is now, a quarterly loss or stagnant profit will eventually push them to turn to some market capture or embrace, extend, extinguish behavior.<p>I’m not the only one who feels this way. A number of instances are prepping to partially or fully block Threads from the get-go.<p>Even without Meta, I’m not excited for another 1M+ instance. My experience is that the larger an instance is, the worse it is. Less community, worse moderation, more bad actors hiding in plain sight. You just can’t toss people into a generalist million people scrum and expect them to form a digital community.<p>If you’re on mastodon.social, you’re not experiencing the best of the fediverse IMO. Find a small instance of your interest (<500 people) and interact with the local timeline. People on my instance recognize me, make in jokes, I chat with the admin and mods, it’s like actual digital neighborhood. It’s really the closest we’ve gotten back to forums and I don’t think dumping a bucket of FAANG-style corporate water on it is the answer.
Wow, this was a pleasant surprise. Now need 2way integration, so that Threads can see posts from Mastodon instances too. But what's the real reason for Meta to do that? Other clients will not show their ads like the official Threads client in the future... Maybe they just need to be "good guys" now, 3rd party with "< 0.1%" share are "OK". Anyway: good to see distribution here.
Am I correct to assume that significant amount of Mastodon instances will not federate with Threads and that I'll still need a handful of ActivityPub accounts in order to access everything?
I really don't get why people keep inviting this kind of abuse in their lives. Regardless of who owns it, oligarch.net doesn't deserve your eyeballs.<p>Luckily, my instance put an end to it faster than one can say "domain block".