Meta/Instagram launched a new product called Threads today (working title project92). It adds a new interface for creating text posts and replying to them, using your Instagram account. Of note, Meta has stated that Threads plans to support ActivityPub in the future, and allow federation with ActivityPub services. If you actually look at your Threads profile page in the app your username has a threads.net tag next to it - presumably to support future federation.
Per the link, a number of fediverse communities are pledging to block any Meta-directed instances that should exist in the future. Thus instance content would not be federated to Meta instances, and Meta users would not be able to interact with instance content.
I’m curious what the opinions on this here are. I personally feel like Meta has shown time and time again that they are not very good citizens of the Internet; beyond concerns of an Eternal September triggered by federated Instagram, I worry that bringing their massive userbase to the fediverse would allow them to influence it to negative effect.
I also understand how that could be seen to go against the point of federated social media in the first place, and I’m eager to hear more opinions. What do you think?
In the 1990s, Microsoft had an internal strategy called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft saw the emerging Internet as a threat to their business, so they wanted to kill it. The basic idea was:
It was working for Microsoft, and was a contributing factor in their killing off Netscape. For those too young to remember, Mozilla is the open-source “liferaft” that Netscape created before their business was destroyed by Microsoft. But, these days it’s effectively controlled by Google, who provides 85% of their funding, as long as they keep Google as the default Firefox search engine and don’t rock the boat.
The only thing that stopped Microsoft from destroying the open Internet was the antitrust case brought against them by the US Department of Justice. Antitrust action is the only thing that has kept innovation happening in tech. The antitrust case against IBM from 1969 to 1982 allowed for the rise of Microsoft. The antitrust case against Microsoft allowed for the rise of Google. Many people think we’re overdue for strong antitrust actions against Google and Facebook/Meta.
Facebook bought out every social competitor they could: Instagram, WhatsApp, etc. They can’t buy out the Fediverse, but they have to see it as an existential threat. Because of that, they’re undoubtedly going to try to use their near-monopoly status to kill off the Fediverse.
The “Embrace” stage will likely be just implementing ActivityPub. That will convince a lot of people that Meta is really on their side, and are working hard to be a good Fediverse citizen. They’ll probably even hire people who are current developers working on the ActivityPub standard, or who have developed key ActivityPub apps.
The “Extend” stage will probably involve adding features to “ActivityPub Alpha” which Threads uses but nothing else uses. It might involve some Meta-specific things, like embedding Instagram in an unusual way. It might involve something that is really expensive for an independent server, but affordable if you’re a multi-billion dollar company, like some kind of copyright check, or flagging if something is AI-generated. The features they’re likely to add won’t be offensive, they’ll probably be good ideas. It’s just that they’ll add them before going through the standards process, and so standards-compliant ActivityPub implementations will seem old and outdated. That will convince many people to move their accounts to Threads, or will at the least reduce the growth for non-Threads ActivityPub.
The “Extinguish” phase will be like when Google shut down Google Reader. Why bother having a standards-compliant way of doing things when usage is so low?
So… yeah, block Meta.