I tend to agree but there may be some small and especially vulnerable communities which need the privacy. I don't know but I'm happy as long as everyone gets to have an instance which suits them.
Not that 1 and 2 are best though. 2 and 3 unless you want to be drowning in swastikas and child porn.
I don’t necessarily need to know anyone on Fedi to enjoy using these platforms.
That depends what you use it for.
On Twitter I followed a lot of specialists in my field. On Reddit there were a lot of (anonymous) specialists in my field. Both were an important part of my working life, and it took two networks totalling ~half a billion people to deliver those few hundred people who made it so useful for me.
And that was also true for my niche hobbies and my niche leisure reading.
Small networks work well for some things. But not all things.
I hear Threads has something like 13 million users in a day or something?
30 million by the end of Day 1, 70m by the end of Day 2, must be way over 100 million by now.
Let's go with the Firefox vs Edge model. Zuckerberg will never respect your privacy and Meta will not adequately moderate. There's a gap, we just need to get our toes stuck in it. Many, many toes.
If I put content out there, I'm usually going to want an audience for it. Obviously there are exceptions to this where people need a small, reliable, defederated instance. But it being data someone can scrape is not an issue.
Having access to my phone, my real name, my internet use, my health data, my financial records. No thanks.
Being part of one big Federation doesn't prevent Zuckerberg from making their feeds shit.
I want to get Meta's data without Meta getting my data and also deciding what I see. That's a proposition a lot of people will like the sound of. But only if we're around to tell them.
Well, that's my other hope. That the Fediverse will steal a steady trickle of Threads users (and Twitter->Threads users) when they find out that they can have better control on an independent instance.
But it's up to us to make sure that's both true and that it happens.
There are several potentially very large corporate instances in the works. My hope is that they can hold each other hostage because it'll be so easy for their users to jump ship. They can embrace but they might not be able to extinguish.
I don't disagree with that. Threads' biggest strength is also its biggest weakness: we've never seen a huge network establish overnight before and it will struggle to develop a culture outside of what Meta serves up via algorithm.
But my niche subs on Reddit had a few thousand users, still only just enough to keep them useful. And it required Reddit's 50 million (daily) users to provide that many.
There will be a lot of people who want the smaller network. But many of the Twitter/Reddit refugees don't, really. And that's where Fedi-growth is coming from right now.
XMPP, famously, died when Google dominated the network and then defederated. Leaving XMPP users no choice but to sign up with Google to keep in touch with the bulk of google users who were no longer there.
Threads does not need to embrace to extinguish, it has 1.6b accounts ready to activate and now over 100m activated in the first three days. Universal defederation will drive a lot of Fedi-users to Threads simply because, if you've come from sites with hundreds of millions of users (Twitter and Reddit), it's going to be very difficult for many to recreate the breadth and depth of content here, and certainly not as quickly.
The Fediverse would technically survive, as XMPP did. But it would likely shrink, not grow.
➡️ To defend against being “Embraced, Extended, and Extinguished.”
This is a real risk, and others point to Google and Facebook and XMPP, or Google and RSS Google reader. Where a big entity takes over, then rug pulls or extends an open standard slowly into a non-standard, non-interoperable functionally siloed service.
This is a real risk. But you don’t - and can’t - defend against this by defederation.
Why not? Because even if the entire existing Fedi pre-blocked them. Instagram has 1.6 BILLION users. If they push this, in one day just on their own they will be the size of the current Fedi’s monthly user base, and then grow from there.
Virtually Instantly, they become the biggest ActivityPub entity on the planet. With or without a mass block.
Some instances defederating is precisely what should happen. But all instances defederating is committing suicide to avoid being murdered.
You can follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon so I would assume it will also be possible from Threads if they federate with at least one Mastodon instance.
It's not a very Reddit-like experience. I tested it on Mastodon by following a community here and it just spammed my feed with out of context replies so I unfollowed it fairly quickly.
But that experience is likely to improve? And no doubt Meta would like to kill Reddit with the same stone that kills Twitter.
If you want a science news community, you'll need to start one, ask someone else to start one, or twiddle your thumbs. Content is going where it belongs.
If you have any interest at all in science, you should have an interest in the accurate dissemination of science, and the ability of scientists to speak freely about their results without fear of political persecution.
Murdering them would be a little wasteful? Just put them and their highest paid lackeys on a remote Pacific Island where the only way they can purchase external supplies is with the plastics they have managed to retrieve from the ocean.
If you were meeting up somewhere you'd arrange to have someone who was at home (and thus by a phone) to orchestrate any last minute changes of plan or notifications of late arrivals (via payphones, which were a thing, once).
You'd go into town regularly to pick up the new bus timetable.
You'd have a huge pile of maps in the back of the car, or one very big map book, often both. If you drove somewhere once, you'd remember the route the next time.
There was a set of encyclopedias at home to look up facts.
And a calendar on the wall. (That's probably still a thing?)
There were a lot more newspapers and magazines around.
Everyone had a little notebook with all their important phone numbers in it. Filofax was revolutionary.
And we still remember the most important phone numbers from that little notebook because we had to dial them so very often.
I tend to agree but there may be some small and especially vulnerable communities which need the privacy. I don't know but I'm happy as long as everyone gets to have an instance which suits them.
Not that 1 and 2 are best though. 2 and 3 unless you want to be drowning in swastikas and child porn.