Adam Mosseri:
Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.
There is no way “EEE” is applicable here outside of spreading FUD. The biggest risk to the Fediverse isn’t Meta, it’s other Fediverse users.
The collective fediverse’s userbase is nothing more than a rounding error to Meta. They probably have to delete a magnitude or two higher number of spam accounts each day.
Threads is 50x the size of the Fediverse and is growing significantly faster. Twitter users are almost certainly their priority.
Meta is probably only using this as a way to convince regulators they don’t need regulation and so some director can put “changed the world” on their resume.
If anything, it’s easier to pull people over because their friends who refuse Mastodon/etc aren’t holding them back.
And the absolute worst case? Meta ends up contributes junk to the ActivityPub protocol or Mastodon, the community forks it, software gets patched to adopt the intricacies of whatever changes are needed to defang whatever controversial stuff gets added in, and everything carries on.
The most realistic concern is the communities that provide a safe space for those regularly subject to harassment online may start getting unwanted attention from trolls. After all, this expands the potential audience from 2 million to 100+ million.
100% agree, I think most reactions here are blown way out of proportion even though I can relate to the general “fuck meta” attitude.
Meta is a trash organization and I think it’s completely fair to approach this with skepticism and some “fuck Meta” attitude. After all, Meta has a demonstrated history of promoting toxic social media habits.
I think, broadly speaking, the fediverse’s exaggerated takes, misinformation that’s outright lies, and aggressiveness on this issue is showing that corporate owned social media isn’t the only harmful social media though.
Facebook/Twitter/etc. had a financial incentive for divisiveness and uncivil discussion. The fediverse doesn’t have this incentive. It’s people voluntarily choosing to do it themselves on the platform they wanted to use as a lifeboat, except now it’s spread out across several servers.
Of course cooperate social media isn’t the only harmful social media, if anything it might be the most civil one for its scale, simply because they’re trying to sell ads next to the content so the content can’t be complete garbage. They also have a bunch of other incentives that ultimately make it a shit experience for everyone, but there is an incentive to moderate.
Something to remember is that it isn’t the company producing the harmful content. It’s people.