What'll happen when Threads introduces ActivityPub? And will it even do so in the first place? A rant
@
Fediverse NewsThe hottest topic in the #
Fediverse right now has to be #
Threads, formerly known as #
P92 or #
Barcelona, the alleged #
Twitter killer by #
Meta, and what'll happen when it federates with the rest of the Fediverse. So without further ado, here are my thoughts about this.
So why did Meta announce Threads to include #
ActivityPub?
Well, it certainly wasn't because they needed a ready-to-use federation protocol. Threads itself will remain a centralised, proprietary, corporate silo with exactly one instance. I mean, when #
Tumblr announced to include ActivityPub, this didn't come with the announcement that everyone will be able to run their own Tumblr instance, remember? It just meant that their silo will be able to connect to Mastodon & Co. and quit being a walled garden.
It's more likely that Threads was planned to get ActivityPub support because at least the EU is going to force online services to become interoperable in some ways. And some big corporations are growing cautious of the expected "or else!" So if Meta wants to offer Threads in the EU, Threads will have to be able to connect to something not owned by Meta. So they've decided to include ActivityPub because a) it's ready-to-use, b) it's free-to-use, c) it already has lots of projects and instances and users to connect to, d) it's something Meta has heard of, and e) it isn't Dorsey's #
ATproto.
I mean, they could also have played it safe and included #
OStatus just to have something they'd theoretically be able to connect to without running into nearly as many renitent netizens opposed to Meta. It'd still pass the #
DigitalServicesAct. But they probably don't even know that OStatus exists.
That said, I currently wouldn't be so certain that Threads will actually add ActivityPub. It has never been Threads' unique selling-point. That'd rather be Twitter-like microblogging without Elon Musk or Jack Dorsey at the helm plus one-click registration for Instagram users. Marc Zuckerberg has never wanted to have his own Mastodon. He has always wanted to have his own Twitter. And now that the real deal is on its deathbed, he finally can.
If ActivityPub integration was actually only planned as appeasement towards the EU, it has become completely unnecessary when Threads blew a raspberry and flipped two birds at the #
GDPR with its iOS app that phones all your most private data home to Threads and Instagram and Facebook to be sold to the highest bidder. Because of that, Meta is banned from offering Threads in the EU altogether. Why appease to the EU when you're banned there anyway?
So there wouldn't be any reason to be surprised if ActivityPub never came to Threads. After all, #
Bluesky has talked big about decentralisation and federation and even the "invention" of #
NomadicIdentity (which was actually invented in 2011 and first implemented in 2012 on Red Matrix, known as #
Hubzilla today). Bluesky was announced long before Threads. Bluesky was launched long before Threads. And just like Threads, it has yet to deliver. As of now, it's just another centralised, monolithic silo, and third-party developments are the only reason why it isn't entirely a walled garden.
I guess even Jack Dorsey had to realise that it's complete non-sense to create a technological platform for decentralised social networking that's only compatible to itself, save for connectors developed by third parties without his consent. I guess he must have realised just how big and wide-spread the ActivityPub-based Fediverse is and how rapidly it's growing. Decentralising Bluesky now would be like introducing a replacement for e-mail that's completely incompatible with e-mail itself.
In fact, I think that Dorsey had launched the Bluesky project and placed high bets on it before he even knew that the Fediverse existed. And when he found out about the Fediverse, there was no way back anymore. Not without being punished by his investors.
Marc Zuckerberg, on the other hand, knew about the Fediverse when he greenlit Project 92, now known as Threads, for one of its earliest announced features was interoperability with the Fediverse via ActivityPub. That's another difference: He didn't want to compete with the Fediverse, he wanted to connect to it. Whether he actually will, now that one of the main perks of doing so has vanished due to Meta being Meta and the EU reacting accordingly, remains to be seen.
But even if ActivityPub came to Threads, that wouldn't mean that Zuck embraces the Fediverse. He won't. Even if they all used ActivityPub, the Fediverse as we know it now would be direct competition for Threads.
Threads won't tell its users about Mastodon, Akkoma, The Project Still Known As CalcKey, Pixelfed, Lemmy etc. That'd be like Microsoft officially acknowledging that Linux-based operating systems are nice, too, if installed stand-alone instead of Windows. That'd be like Apple officially publishing a list of the top five greatest Android phones with Samsung on #1.
Threads won't tell its users how to migrate to another Fediverse instance. That'd be like Microsoft officially publishing a tutorial on how to wipe your hard drive and replace the Windows on your computer with Ubuntu.
And Threads won't add migration functionality to elsewhere in the Fediverse either. That'd be like Microsoft installing an exporter for personal data on everyone's Windows machines on the next patch day that makes it easier for you to keep your data when replacing Windows with GNU/Linux on your machine.
For a while after ActivityPub has been activated, practically nobody on Threads would make use of it, especially not to connect with users in the rest of the Fediverse. They simply won't know that this rest of the Fediverse exists, much less who exists there. If any connections will be established, they'll be in-bound.
Even these first connections won't come to pass by someone discovering a cool Threads account in their Mastodon timeline. Instead, someone will stumble upon Threads accounts either because they're on Threads themselves or because the addresses of these Threads accounts are published somewhere on the Web, e.g. someone adding their Threads ID to their blog or their website. They'd end up connecting by copy-pasting that someone's Threads ID into their search field.
After these first connections have been established, it will still take very very long for the Threads users to discover that there's a Fediverse beyond Threads. No, really.
For comparison: Many of you came into the Fediverse through mastodon.social. And I dare say that a great deal of those of you did not know anything about decentralisation and instances and all that stuff at that point and instead believed that they had joined another centralised walled garden like Twitter. Someone has told me a while ago that some people who came in through mastodon.social took three months to even notice that Mastodon is decentralised, that many of the toots in their timelines come from someplace else than mastodon.social.
It takes new Mastodon users even longer to discover that there's a Fediverse beyond Mastodon. From my experience, that's often three to six months. There are three major ways for Mastodon users to find that out.
One, you stumble upon a post that mentions Fediverse projects that aren't Mastodon, and that mentions that they're Fediverse projects and connected to Mastodon.
Two, you post something that implies or out-right claims that the Fediverse is only Mastodon, and someone comes and tells you otherwise in the comments.
Three, you discover weird-looking posts in your timeline that can't possibly come from Mastodon with way over 500 characters, strange-looking mentions, strange-looking hashtags etc. If you inquire whoever wrote that post about it, they'll tell you they aren't on Mastodon, but on an instance of another project which is nonetheless connected to Mastodon.
It'll be very similar on Threads, but on a much greater scale with a much bigger timeframe. I guess many Threads users may spend years without even encountering a post from outside. Most will spend many months. And I'm not talking about actually noticing that the post in question did not originate on Threads.
Unless Threads will actually slam account IDs with non-Threads domains on them into its users' faces, I think one element that Threads users will notice will be hashtags which Threads doesn't have, but which I don't expect Threads to strip out entirely like Mastodon strips out any and all text formatting. Thread user: "Hey dumbass, this ain't Twitter, Threads doesn't have hashtags!" External user: "But Mastodon has them. I'm on Mastodon and not on Threads." Thread user: "What's Mastodon, and WTF are you doing on my timeline then?!" External user: "[Fediverse explanation noises]" And even this will only lead to one more Threads user knowing about the rest of the Fediverse. Out of hundreds of millions.
The difference between mastodon.social and Threads is that new arrivals on mastodon.social are left uninformed about what Mastodon is and how it works to make on-boarding easier than if they were educated about decentralisation and instances and other Fediverse projects and then left to choose the project and the instance themselves. Threads users, on the other hand, are left believing that, beyond being a centralised silo, Threads is a walled garden with no connections to the outside world whatsoever. To be fair, it is one right now and will remain one for the foreseeable future. mastodon.social doesn't try to pretend to be a walled garden. And Mastodon itself only does so a little by hardly, if ever, acknowledging the rest of the Fediverse.
If Threads users should actually set out to discover the rest of the Fediverse and make connections to there, the impression they get from the Fediverse won't be too positive. That's because two out of three Fediverse instances will be inaccessible to them due to having blocked Threads altogether. From the point-of-view of a Threads user who has always put full trust and faith into all Facebook/Meta products and never used anything decentralised before, believing that even e-mail is a Microsoft or Google or Yahoo! product, the Fediverse will appear as nothing but a bunch of entitled arseholes.
It certainly won't help that the [Fediverse explanation noises] won't include, "This is all just hackish amateur stuff rather than professional corporate software development, and we're lightyears from your features, but it does its job." Instead, users from other Fediverse projects will mention ("brag about") the features that these other Fediverse projects have that Threads lacks. Hashtags, for example. Let me show you them.
It gets even worse if someone on Threads happens upon someone on something else than Mastodon. In comparison with Akkoma, Threads pales more. In comparison with what's-still-but-not-for-much-longer-called-CalcKey, it pales even more. And now imagine what'd happen if someone on Threads met someone on Hubzilla. Or /kbin. "Whaddaya mean, you're talkin' to me from a Reddit clone?! How's that even possible?"
Okay, so those Fediverse people aren't just entitled, they're also snooty braggarts who claim that their stuff that was developed with a budget of zero is allegedly better than Threads that was developed with a several-billion-dollar budget.
Let's just say that even if the Threads users discovered the Fediverse beyond Threads by-and-by, they wouldn't be too keen on connecting to what's left of it that they can actually connect to. The biggest chances will be if it'll be possible on Threads to share Follow Friday posts from Mastodon in such a way that it isn't too obvious that they come from Mastodon. Since Mastodon mentions don't include domains, they might pretty well pass for mentioning Threads users, and the Threads community will believe that Follow Friday was invented on Threads. Also, out-right celebrities on George Takei's level of fame if they reside on instances that don't block Threads. But otherwise, no chance.
