this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Huh. You'd think more instances were blocking, given the amount of buzz.
Being generallky in favor of letting individual users make this call that's... mildly encouraging. Of course I happen to be in an instance that is blocking, so...
It's worth noting that this still splits Mastodon pretty much in half. That's arguably a bigger concern than anything else Meta may be doing. They may not even have to actually federate to break Mastodon, which is a very interesting dynamic.
Oh, hard disagree on the last part, at least.
As always in left-leaning spaces, the best way to disarm any threat of reform is to wait for whatever purity test over a random issue to trigger a schism, sit back and watch. It's not even the first time it happens to Mastodon specifically.
In this case, a potential competitor that already has a reputation for being overcomplicated and having bad UX now needs an extra FAQ item called "can I interact with Threads from Mastodon?" and the answer is "it depends".
It's terrible, self-destructive and worse than either a yes or no call. Zuck boned Masto by federating a handful of employee accounts only AND he's still going to get the plausible deniability in front of regulators from federating with whatever's left. I'd be impressed if I thought Meta did it on purpose instead of it being entirely self-inflicted.
Thanks for putting this in words, I had been struggling thinking about what was bothering me about this.
Hey can you help me reword the commenter above you about what they meant? I had a hard time fully understanding it, maybe I'm not updated enough about Meta to understand what exactly Zuck wants to have plausible-deniability about?
I can only tell you what I read it as: it's about the current increase in regulations from the EU, this can be specifically read as a way to avoid getting regulated by DMA which aims to make any massively popular services have to have crossplay or compatibility methods that any other competitor can use.
It's basically asking any service to have a standard way of interoperability with everyone else, which ActivityPub can be considered for social media, and Meta is using federating with ActivityPub based services while getting blocked by them as a plausibly deniable way of interoperability without actually having to do that because they're blocked by most of the other services and they can surely find ways to block other popular servers by claiming that those servers are not doing as good of a job at moderating, allowing Meta to have their cake and eat it too basically.
I hope this helps, I tried to cover every possible way to explain it that I could think of. I tried to see if ChatGPT can help but I felt it was lacking.
It's not just ideological. Many people and instances on the fediverse have minorities using them. These minorities rely on it to share and discuss in safe spaces. The federation of threads is a threat to these safe space.