More:

"Look. At the end of the day, I’m a Mastodon partisan. But I don’t love its collective tendency toward self-important dogmatism....The truth is, #Threads is not about Mastodon. It’s about Meta and only about Meta, and Mastodon isn’t important enough to them to spend the considerable effort that would be necessary to destroy it.

It’d be awfully damn ironic if the Fediverse decides it’s become necessary to destroy itself to stop them."

https://tracks.ranea.org/post/722507935765397504/youre-so-vain-you-probably-think-this-app-is

@tchambers This debate reminds me of the great AOL / Internet merger of 1995!

@lonseidman Word for word. Only the names have been swapped out.

@lonseidman @tchambers Yep — there was *huge* consternation at all the AOL normies showing up on the real internet.

@michaelgemar @tchambers It was the end of days!

@lonseidman @tchambers To be fair, the internet *is* much worse now than before those darned AOLers showed up!

@tchambers that was a good read

@jbaert 👍

@tchambers @chipotle it'd be dangerously ironic and sad if we destroyed ourselves.

@tchambers @chipotle @brentsimmons

@tchambers @chipotle @brentsimmons This is an EXCELLENT article that nails the issue at hand.

@tchambers
Damn good article. 😐

It shows that the fediverse is still young after all. The sheer existence of Threads send shockwaves through the fediverse and pushes some admins and users to harsh reactions (like defederate those that federate with it). But it is the first time a REAL giant announced to join it.

The fediverse needs better onboarding, moving, moderation and even government functions. And will hopefully get those in time. 🙂
@chipotle

I'm so happy I'm on this server and I'm happy to help fund it too. It really does matter which server you pick. Keep calm and carry on, @tchambers.

@simongray Thank you, Simon!

@Regez
Für einen wirklichen beidseitigen Test müssten ja beide Parteien mitmachen und das wird auf Metas Seite einfach nicht passieren. 😬

Und auf Fediverse-seite ist das Ding halt, dass Threads eines Tages halt die Förderation (die Verbindung) anschaltet. Und ab da kann gegenseitig gefolgt werden, wenn Threads nicht blockiert ist.

Dein Vorschlag wird aber sicher sowieso von einigen Technikinteressierten umgesetzt werden. Die können ihre Erkenntnisse dann veröffentlichen.
@tchambers @chipotle

@tchambers @chipotle Interesting piece. I agree with the general spirit and in most points, but there are a couple places I disagree.

@tchambers @chipotle "Threads and Mastodon are already really different culturally. Even when-slash-if the ActivityPub bridge exists, I don’t think … many Mastodon users [will] be rushing to follow their friends on Threads through the Mastodon client of their choice." Strong disagree. Threads is already big enough to contain subcultures, and within them lots of accounts I would like to follow.

@tchambers @chipotle "I predict the vast majority of people who want to use both networks will maintain separate accounts to do so." Not sure the point of this? I specifically want to follow people on Threads without that obnoxious mall vibe - if I can do it without Meta spyware all the better. Why would I want to juggle two apps or accounts?

@tchambers @chipotle "Personally, I would federate with Threads in 'silence' mode: my instance’s users would be able to follow Threads users and vice versa, but posts from Threads would not show up in any public timelines on my server." This seems neither here nor there. Indeed it seems more useful for protecting Threads users from Mastodon than vice versa. My concern is targeted harassment campaigns, not ambient bullshit in a public timeline.

@tchambers @chipotle "A server explicitly welcomes Nazis, child porn, TERFs, and serial harassers? Block that fucker. But it’s absurd to insist that federating with Meta’s general-interest server presents the same threat level." Uhh... replace "TERFs" with transphobes, and I'm not sure how Libs of Tik Tok doesn't qualify for the last two.

@misc @chipotle

All fair points, Jesse. But my priors are that I do think we will follow them vastly more than they follow us. Think it will be very systematic. But who knows?

@tchambers @chipotle Systematic?

@misc @chipotle D'oh! Autocorrect messed that up while typing on a train. Fixed. "Asymmetric" was what I was going for.

@misc @chipotle Yeah, I agree with you there, and accounts like that play the mainstream platforms system to go right to the edge of the platform's terms of use but not just far enough to be banned. But we can use our own moderation metrics for such accounts and not need to take out the whole server. Unless the whole server is consistently unmoderated and harassing. Which is how most admins treat all servers now.

@tchambers @chipotle Libs of Tik Tok has been existing comfortably on Instagram for years. Even if fedi admins block that account, that’s not the issue. The issue is people on Threads who follow it. (and potentially migrate to Mastodon if LOTT declares holy war on the fediverse as a den of iniquity. Which really doesn’t strike me as a far out possibility.)

@tchambers @chipotle The problem with the existing toolset as I understand it is that Threads is essentially one instance. If they can’t get their house in order quickly, the experiment is over. And their track record doesn’t make me optimistic.

@tchambers @chipotle I just have little correction - although Meta cares more about titties and profanities there are some areas where is Meta more relaxed - for example some racists remarks (at least in Czech language). Meta is notoriously bad for moderating these (probably because titties are same in all cultures but racist euphemisms are very culture specific).

@tchambers @chipotle really good read, thank you. It's changed my perspective on this - I didn't realise that "silence" mode was an option.

@severak @chipotle Agreed this is where Mastodon's distributed and local moderation I think is actually FAR better than thousands of centralized Trust and Safety teams.

A good distinction that full defederation (as opposed to say silencing) should be a nuclear option used for only the most extreme cases of basically unmoderated servers.

@chipotle @tchambers You know, I thought LoTT had been banned from Twitter until Elon came back in and declared Nazi amnesty. But it seems like they have been there on and off the whole time? That might change my calculus a bit. Really comes down to specifics.

@tchambers @chipotle I keep thinking of that leaked "no moat" memo from Google. "Open source is eating our lunch". They can't fight with money something that doesn't want to be monetized.

@JustinH @chipotle

Fully agree 👍

@tchambers @chipotle for me the question was never 'Meta could try to destroy us' as 'even if they weren't trying, Meta (3bn DAUs) could destroy us (2m DAUs)'.

It's not vain for the fruit and veg market stall to worry about the 1500x bigger supermarket opening up next door.