Meta Launches Threads, And It’s Important For Reasons That Most People Won’t Care About
from the though-they-should dept
As you may have heard, yesterday Meta finally launched Threads, its Twitter-like microblogging service, built on ActivityPub, but using Instagram account credentials for login. The reaction from across the internet has been fascinating. I’ve seen everything from people insisting that this will clearly finally be the one single “Twitter killer” everyone’s been waiting for, to this is the microblogging equivalent of Steve Buscemi saying “how do you do, fellow kids.”
Clearly, lots of people were willing to check it out. Mark Zuckerberg (on Threads) claimed that 2 million people signed up in just the first few hours.
Of course, I got that screenshot on the web (which lets you see things, but not login or post to Threads). When I tried to get a copy of it from the mobile app where you can actually post, I got this:
So, uh, yeah, still some kinks to work out.
By this morning, Zuck was saying Threads had 30 million signups in its first day.
I mean, that’s what you get for bootstrapping on a social network and social graph that already has over 2 billion users. Some are complaining that this is an example of Meta leveraging its “dominant” position to enter a new market, but as I explain below, I don’t think this is so bad, because the open protocol nature of this means it’s actually resistant to the worst potential exploitation.
I have no idea how Threads will do. It’s possible it’ll catch on. It’s possible it’ll flop. I have no real crystal ball on how it will do, and people who are insisting that one outcome or the other is inevitable are just guessing, so they can claim they knew it all along when whatever happens, happens.
What Meta does have, though, is the ability to scale this. While there is a relatively small team working on it, apparently just “a few dozen” Instagram employees, Meta does have the infrastructure in place to scale if it does catch on, which still remains a challenge for basically everyone else.
And, it’s not just the technical infrastructure, but the trust and safety infrastructure as well. Not that I think anyone is going to say that Meta has been particularly good at handling trust and safety challenges, but they have people and they have technology… and (importantly) they have experience.
But, still, the bigger, and more important part here, is just the fact this is built on ActivityPub. Back in December, I talked about when Mastodon/ActivityPub might have its “Gmail moment,” where a big company steps in and offers a better UI, better features, and a simpler onboarding setup.
While a bunch of mid-sized companies have embraced ActivityPub, including Mozilla, Medium, and Flipboard, Meta is in a different league altogether. And that has both advantages and disadvantages.
But, the important point to me, and the one thing that matters, is that this shows that big companies can make use of interoperable protocols to build on, rather than building up silos. While Threads does not currently interoperate with the rest of the fediverse, the company has made clear that it intends to do so at some point, and even included this fact in the splash screen when you first setup Threads:
And that’s important. For the last two decades, the big internet companies have mostly focused on building their own proprietary silos, rather than using open protocols and interoperating.
Now, it’s true that some of the new European regulations coming into force put pressure on tech companies to interoperate more, but it remains to be seen how well that actually works (and notably, Threads is not available in the EU, as they found it impossible to currently comply with GDPR requirements). What is clear and is notable, is that this is the first time in a long time that we’ve seen a “big tech” company embrace an open protocol.
And, yes, some people fear that the goal is to “embrace, extend, extinguish,” to use the old Microsoft playbook. But the nice thing about protocols is it actually creates incentives against doing so. Because of its open nature, if you don’t like where Meta is going with threads, you can go elsewhere. But you can do so without losing your ability to communicate with those in your network who remain on Threads.
That’s powerful and it’s how the internet was always supposed to work, but which we’ve gone away from.
Indeed, one way to look at this is that it’s Meta bringing many millions of new people to the protocol-based decentralized social media world. And even if plenty stay within Meta’s private park, it will allow those outside the network to communicate with those inside, and also to highlight how they can get the same basic thing without having to cough up data to Meta.
So, I’m personally not that excited about Threads as a product, nor am I all that worried about it doing something bad for the fediverse. I am excited that it shows how big companies can make use of open protocols in a manner that keeps the internet more open, enabling communication not just within a single silo, but where the users have more control, rather than a single centralized company.
Having more of that is a good thing.
And, while I know a bunch of Mastodon instances are planning to defederate from Threads as soon as it connects to the wider fediverse, I think the statement put out by Mastodon creator, Eugen Rochko, is actually quite thoughtful about all this:
We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.
I agree completely. This is validation of open protocols and pushing power to the ends of the network, rather than just another silo. That, alone, is a good thing that should be celebrated.
Filed Under: activitypub, fediverse, interoperability, mark zuckerberg, mastodon, microblogging, open protocols, protocols, protocols not platforms, social media
Companies: meta, threads
Comments on “Meta Launches Threads, And It’s Important For Reasons That Most People Won’t Care About”
And they’ll still try to silo things off because that’s what corporations like Facebook do. They want to have all the control instead of merely partial control over what users see and do. Hell, I bet Zuck’s pissed that he can’t force-feed ads on Threads to other ActivityPub servers.
Re:
It’s not certain that Zuck is pissed. I mean, his emotion chip might be malfunctioning. Or the fediverse is such a small user base that it’s not a priority when compared to vacuuming up as many Twitter users as possible, and all Facebook’s talk of “ActivityPub” and “federation” is just a sales pitch to intensify the feeling of Threads being the next big thing instead of, you know, threadbare.
Re:
If I understand the story correctly, the thing is siloed off now, and they say at some future time it won’t be. Which shows that big companies can talk about making use of interoperable protocols. As to actually using them, haven’t things like Gmail already proven it can be done?
Re: Re:
Yes, but with the caveat that Gmail and its corporate ilk have essentially destroyed the ability for people to self-host email. Anyone who wants to use email today must use a corporate-owned service—with all the data-scraping and such that entails.
Also: Email was a thing looooooooong before Google and Gmail were things, whereas ActivityPub is still young enough that Facebook still has a chance to fuck it up and turn it into something decidedly not decentralized and interoperable.
Re: Re: Re:
“Yes, but with the caveat that Gmail and its corporate ilk have essentially destroyed the ability for people to self-host email. Anyone who wants to use email today must use a corporate-owned service—with all the data-scraping and such that entails.”
I mean… that ability is very much still there, there is literally nothing stopping you from setting up your own server or using a 3rd party that doesn’t do such things.
There’s arguments as to why people pass on the management to Google et al. and why it’s better to have them deal with the issues involved, but nothing they’ve done has removed the ability for someone to self-host.
Re: Re: Re:2
People who’ve done this have often reported problems contacting those who use the big corporate services. So, yes, they can set up a server and receive mail from anyone, but if they’re blocked from contacting like 20%+ of other people, that’s at least lessened the ability to self-host. Guess how much help Google tech support gives to administrators of small systems that have been flagged as spammers. As a bonus, they usually won’t tell you that you’re blocked, so you don’t find out till someone starts asking why you never mailed them.
Re: Re: Re:3
It’s been a while since I self-hosted admittedly, but in my experience it’s usually fairly clear when you’ve been blocked, at least for reasons like being on blacklists or not having DMARC set, and so on.
The bigger problems are people ignoring the bounced back mails because they’re full of “scary” technical information, or the recipient gets the mail in a spam folder they never check. Believe me, I’ve dealt with end users and getting them to even forward a rejected email response, let alone copy the headers, is not a small task.
There might be other problems, the issue is usually that as spammers have become more sophisticated, the list of things you need to do to bypass the filtering gets more complex and it’s better for most people to push that overhead off to someone else. But, that’s not the fault of GMail, et al., it’s just the reality of dealing with spammers. As with all Google services they could be better with support and transparency – but they are popular for a reason, and that reason isn’t that they stop others from hosting.
Re: Re: Re:4
If you get on one of the big public blacklists, you’ll know about it because you’ll have difficulty sending mail anywhere. Also, you can simply check. But the rumor, which I haven’t personally dealt with, is that Gmail and Hotmail have their own private blacklists, and might just delete incoming messages or direct them to a spam folder without sending a bounce. “For no reason.” (Whether or not this is actually common, the perception itself drives people away from self-hosting.)
Of course that’s not the reason, nor do they explictly or literally do that. But it’s an inherent problem of centralization, or “monopoly power” if you like. Kind of like how Walmart and Amazon make it more difficult to operate small businesses.
It used to be that if you had a thousand e-mail addresses, they’d probably be across a few hundred domains with maybe 50 people on the most common server. With so many people administering servers, it was not practical to block “unknown” ones nor to keep private lists of spammers. A quick web search suggests that more than half of all addresses are Gmail addresses now, with another 10 to 20 percent being Microsoft.
Re: Re: Re:5
One of the issues is that to combat some of the malware botnets that spread via spam, the big services have moved beyond DKIM, DEMARC and SBL to check the IP zone of the sender. So if the mail server is hosted on a subscriber IP instead of a commercial IP, it gets silently dropped, against RFCs, instead of bounced like it’s supposed to.
The other is that the big mail providers also do “smart” filtering into spam folders that ALSO doesn’t bounce the message, so you end up in a similar situation where source IPs without high enough reputation get routed automatically to the spam folder, and neither the sender nor the recipient get any feedback about the action.
This will also become common on ActivityPub, even if Threads is never federated, for similar reasons.
Re: Re: Re:5
“might just delete incoming messages or direct them to a spam folder without sending a bounce”
I have doubts here. I’ve not heard of any of them actually deleting messages without following usual protocol, but I have heard people whining about having messages with very obvious properties that would trigger spam filters whining about unfair treatment when they’re triggered.
“It used to be that if you had a thousand e-mail addresses, they’d probably be across a few hundred domains with maybe 50 people on the most common server.”
It used to be that the internet was a niche hobby or platform for a select number of people who had the time, ability and interest to run their own servers. Those times disappeared a couple of decades ago.
The bottom line is that there’s billions of email addresses out there, and spammers are incentivised to use whatever tricks they can to fool people. But, nobody wants to actually read spam even if they can manually filter it, and it can be a full time job to run a server that does it for them. So, most people farm that out to other companies. Some choose to continue using the Yahoo/AOL mails they used before, some use GMail/Office365/whatever. But, the point is – the fact that most people decide to pay those companies to manage their email instead of hiring a dedicated Exchange/sendmail admin does not mean that they’re using dirty tricks to get people to do that. Especially since both Google and MS include it as part of an overall office package, which people would have been paying licences for anyway pre-cloud.
Smaller players may suffer if they don’t meet the standard needed to send to those bigger players. But, I rarely see any demand there that’s actually not needed in the modern sphere, where a spammer can buy access to a botnet for little more than an old school spammer would have spent on his dialup connection.
Re: Re: Re:2
Self-hosts and small hosts get permablackholed with basically zero recourse.
Re: Re: Re:3
The solution here of course is to run your mail server on a cloud service. That way, you control the server, but the IP is in a netblock with high reputation. So unless someone actually sends spam from your server, it’s unlikely to get blocked.
But it’s really stupid that this has to be the case. Makes me wish I had bought my own /30 back in the day.
Re: Re: Re:4
If you’re lucky…
(I suspect the more realistic option is to self-host only on the receiving side, and pay some reputable company to relay your outgoing mail—if your ISP doesn’t already provide a relay.)
The thing to worry about is not that someone will send spam from your server, but that they will have already sent spam (or otherwise objectionable packets) before you got the address(es). Or that one of your “neighbors” will have sent spam—mail administrators don’t generally know how many addresses are assigned, so there’s a good chance they’ll overblock.
Don’t forget that cloud services are scraping the bottom of the IPv4-address barrel almost as much as the rest of us. They constantly need more addresses and can’t be picky about only accepting “good” ones.
In what “day” would an IPv4 /30 ever have been for sale? I didn’t think such a small block had ever been acceptable for BGP announcement, and I’m not sure whether RIRs track ownership at this granularity.
Re: Re: Re:2
Yes, the ability still exists. But this is less about whether can we self-host and more about how much work self-hosting entails compared to using Gmail.
Re: Re: Re:3
Yes, there’s a significant overhead involved with self-hosting in the modern world during the decades-old arms battle between spammers and hosts. That does not equate to GMail being responsible for destroying self-hosting.
Re: Re: Re:
I would qualify that as free service.. I pay for Fastmail for my domains, no scraping and such entailed..
Re: Re: Re:2
Well, maybe… I’ve looked into them, and Australian privacy and surveillance laws do not inspire confidence—though the company itself seems pretty good.
Mike, I think paragraph misses what the extend/extinguish phases mean. If Meta where to attempt this, they would first embrace ActivityPub (as they seem to be doing), then they would need to become important enough that NOT having access to their content (users) would be a lose for the majority of ActivityPub users. Then they would make protocol extensions to ActivityPub that would at first be useful… but eventually later ones would come under patents or other restrictions. Thus people would be force to either, abandon Meta’s user base and or collection of content (which could likely no longer be extracted losslessly), or cede control of the majority of the ecosystem to Meta.
The goal of that tactic is to appear identical to any other community contributor… until right before you stab them all in the back.
I’m not saying that Meta’s trying to play that card. Just that the specified paragraph is… very non-compelling.
Re: enshittification in progress
It is all part of the enshittification process.
I would like to see the (never gonna happen) fisticuffs between Musk and Zuck though.
Re:
For a real world example of what embrace extend extinguish looks like with an open protocol, I would point to XMPP. You can still happily run your own instance of any of several servers, but most of the users and ecosystem just evaporated when Google Talk quietly but suddenly stopped interoperating.
Re: Re:
To be fair, not even Google knows what the fuck is going on with Google messaging apps. I doubt they’ve ever had enough coordination to come up with a plan to intentionally kill XMPP.
If Facebook decides to fuck with ActivityPub, I assume they’ll keep importing data from it but make it difficult to export. Maybe they’ll stop that entirely, or maybe they’ll add features that don’t work with ActivityPub—for example, embedded quizzes that simply don’t appear when viewed from a third-party service.
and now cry baby elon threatens to sue meta
wadda douche
Twitter threatens to sue Meta over Threads – Semafor
https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-is-threatening-sue-meta-over-threads-semafor-2023-07-06/
Lawsuit ho
Didn’t take long for Twitter to send a legal nastygram over this. Something about having the specific intent of hiring former Twitter employees who have ongoing access to highly confidential inside information and trade secrets, in order to set up a copy of Twitter.
Then the letter swerves hard into complaining about third parties data scraping Twitter’s site, which Meta is somehow responsible for. Either the letter’s confused, or I am.
Re:
If Musk and Spiro had any actionable proof they would have actually sued instead of sending a vaguely worded letter.
This is PR nonsense.
Even if Meta actually hired every single fired employee – how the hell is it Meta’s fault that Twitter 2.0’s HR staff was reduced so severely they could not revoke intranet access even after nine months?
Even if they still had access – how is it utilizing trade secrets to base their code off of activitypub? Or is Musk trying to papas on the idea of microblogging is a confidential trade secret?
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Is it important because there's an injunction preventing the CDC and FBI from telling them to censor?
Y’know, just like they did with Twitter and Facebook….and a federal judge just told them they can’t, anymore.
Y’know, the thing you keep lying about and pretending didn’t happen.
You just mean censorship. Of course if it’s “federated” any such censorship essentially just winds up the hecklers veto….as you’ve so ably demonstrated here at TD.
Re:
Wow, yer really full of it today huh.
Re:
lmao fuck off
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Re: Re:
You might as well admit I was right.
Re: Re: Re:
lmao fuck off
Re:
Alternately, and … hear me out… maybe it’s you that’s pretending it did happen?
Re:
Boy, you’re as full of shit as a christmas goose.
Oh, you mean that thing that there’s no evidence of, despite numerous claims that there is?
They’re not pretending; it didn’t happen.
Thank you for once again clearly demonstrating that you don’t know what words mean, because other users downvoting you into having your comments hidden isn’t censorship. You’re just a crybaby who thinks it is.
Re:
“Of course if it’s “federated” any such censorship essentially just winds up the hecklers veto”
It probably wouldn’t kill you to familiarise yourself with words and technology before commenting.
“as you’ve so ably demonstrated here at TD”
We’re not picky – all people who spout false information, make long-debunked arguments or just seem incapable of expressing a thought based on facts gets hidden. It’s not just you.
Re: Does Elmo know your name yet?
“Y’know, the thing you keep lying about”
Every accusation, a confession…
Re:
I guess we can now add “heckler’s veto” to the list of terms you don’t understand the actual definition of.
Re:
Chozen’s still not going to let you be the big spoon, you know.
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People are still idiots who love censorship loving, centralized services, I see.
Re:
lmao fuck off Hyman
Re: Re:
That’s right, tell Hywoman to fuck off. There is no room in the progressive gene pool for rapists.
I think this is less of a gmail moment and more of a Mozilla/Chromium moment. That future of social media is solidifying around fediverse-activitypub and it will be what everyone builds off of. Including 3rd party software and integrations.
That anyone who refuses to join in will be seen as a dinosaur and left behind. Become slowly incompatible.
Good thing that the primary microblogging service didn’t fire all of its engineers who could do that sort of transition!
Oh wait….
Awe, so...
How easy it would be to take all the communication and sort things out to match anything to something.
Sociology
Psychology
Police agencies
So much to see and understnad..but will the goo dbe used and not the bad?
“So, uh, yeah, still some kinks to work out.”
Which, is fine during launch. It’s when those kinks suddenly appear on a mature platform after a weirdo tycoon bought it that you have to worry…
“I have no idea how Threads will do. It’s possible it’ll catch on. It’s possible it’ll flop”
Honestly, I think it’s down to a few factors. One is how many people decide to jump ship from Twitter – many want to but since (despite the monopoly claims of some regulars) people can have as many active social media accounts as they want, and we probably won’t be out of the evaluation phase until at least when BlueSky goes public.
From there, it’s really just the network effect and how it deals with the EU and other countries. If they can’t get the GDPR sorter and BlueSky can, maybe they’ll struggle, but if they can then there’s a natural audience. It’s a shame that we’re seeing another billionaire battle and Threads was first, but at least these ones seem to be interested in the appearance of a workable platform.
Re:
To paraphrase Beau of the fifth column, the fight between Zuck and Musk here is going to be much like a US election – you pick the candidate you want to lose.
The Musk-Twitter shitshow begs belief from start to finish but you know twitter’s owner done trod in it good and proper when other platforms start muscling in on what used to be twitters almost exclusive fiefdom not even two years ago…
Re: The new Google+?
I don’t think Threads will fail because they’ll botch federation with ActivityPub (which they will). Instead, it will be because:
1. Existing Twitter communities won’t agree to go to Threads in unison. They’ll either break up entirely, soldier on at Twitter, or re-form in smaller groups on Discord, Tumblr, maybe even Reddit (which is looking like an option again).
2. For users who just look at celebrity tweets and then respond into oblivion, Threads will look spammy. This is because, again, not all famous people will drop everything just to make Threads the next big thing, so people’s timelines will start to look sparse, with little content users are actually interested in. Then, Zuck’s algorithm will just throw posts at you (maybe even from Facebook & Instagram) hoping you’ll stay around. Without a Following-only view (or even a way to see who you’re following), Threads will just end up looking spammy and boring, like Facebook does now.
Re: Re:
The Fediverse as it stands now is largely about people who want a social media network where attention isn’t controlled by algorithms and timelines aren’t plagued by “influencers” and clout-chasers. Threads is the polar opposite of that approach, which is probably another big reason why numerous Masto instances have preëmptively refused to federate with Threads.
Re: Re: Re:
Yeah, they’re ultimately different businesses. Some people think that not having to chase ad dollars and have “influencers” on the platform is actually a bonus. Not great for business, but then many Mastodon hosts aren’t businesses.
Re: Re:
“Existing Twitter communities won’t agree to go to Threads in unison”
A hell of a lot already have. But, the beauty of these things is that they don’t have to – despite the claims of some, it’s possible to maintain multiple social media accounts. Someone can have a Threads, a Twitter, a Mastodon and a BlueSky account (among as many others as they want) and then adjust their messaging depending on where their audience is.
“so people’s timelines will start to look sparse”
I know I’m not a typical user, but I looked at my Twitter earlier and I saw exactly 2 accounts in my “following” feed. Meanwhile the major complaint about Threads I’ve seen is that there’s too many “influencers” people aren’t interested in making it too noisy.
The former seems to have been a bug, since I just checked it on desktop now and it looks more”normal”, but there’s some obvious exceptions.
“Threads will just end up looking spammy and boring, like Facebook does now.”
I’ll always maintain that FB is what you make of it. With a curated feed only allowing posts from people you actually care about seeing and blocking the obvious trolls, it’s not a bad experience, other than the idiotic decision to try and guess what you want to see rather than showing it in chronological order.
But, as I say, Threads is only one of numerous options, and now is the time to find out what’s best for you instead of complaining that one of them isn’t for you.
Could be a huge win for the fediverse, if the fediverse weren’t fundamentally broken. Everyone is going to defederate them because Facebook Bad, never mind that Meta doesn’t actually need to federate to slurp down the data if they really wanted it.
Re:
From a certain point of view, yes. But from my experience, a good chunk of the Fediverse as it stands today doesn’t want a “huge win” (i.e., potentially millions of new people on the Fediverse all at once) because they don’t want to be part of a huge social media service. They went to Masto so they could get away from the corporate silos and create a better social media experience.
I don’t deny that Mastodon has problems. Alls I’m saying is that those aren’t a dealbreaker for me because the Fediverse is a much chiller experience than Twitter, at least in my experience. I’d rather have that than have whatever Threads might bring to the Fediverse—including Facebook’s desire to own it.
While competition in the area is always good and Meta seems to be embracing open standards… It’s Meta. As for the open standard, Google embraced chromium and now it dictates where things go. Ad concerning competition, well, Threads has the same problem plaguing it from the beginning: a billionaire.
Errrmmmm self hosting problems?
I self host my email, I also host mail for several other people. Sometimes I have problems, the latest being Spamhaus changing its rules but not telling me in the blacklisting what rule I had broken. Took me a day or two to find and fix. All the information was there, it took a few Google searches to find it.
You need to install SSL certificates, these are free and easy, you need to put the right strings into your DNS, fiddly but not hard, you need to make sure the relevant ports are blocked from outside intrusion, but you need to do that anyway. What exactly are the problems?