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.

While that’s true, I’m not sure how many people are using Mastodon that way and if that’s actually the main concern. In the end it still is meant to be a public platform. Not on the same level of “private messages and photos” where most people would probably be very concerned.

Look at the fediverse’s monthly active users, it’s declining. There’s a pretty solid wall of friction when trying to participate and the vast majority of people won’t ever be a part of it in its current state. There’s no upward tend here and I doubt that it’s ever going to be a real danger for meta.

I think Bluesky is even smaller. It probably could’ve been a Twitter competitor before threads came around.

100% agree, I think most reactions here are blown way out of proportion even though I can relate to the general “fuck meta” attitude.

What communities are you talking about specifically? I tried but I haven’t yet found a list of those that defederated preemptively. I can’t imagine it’s the majority of instances/users.

I have the same question. Lemmy and Mastodon are both public and as of yet, no one was able to tell me what “privacy” actually looks like for data in that context. Other than the fact that Meta will destroy it. It’s public, anyone can access it already.

Active users went down, though. I don’t think mastodon is a big competitor for Meta, Twitter and TikTok are.

It sounds a bit sarcastic, not sure if you mean it that way. One question: what privacy are you talking about with services that are meant to be entirely open? App analytics?

I think the reason why meta wants to federate is this:

• it helps with anticompetitive arguments, because it’s “open” and not controlled by meta alone
• some will refuse to use anything from meta, and threads users being able to communicate with them adds value
• it won’t hurt meta, because the majority will be using their app anyways
• it helps their image

I don’t think they’re doing it to “get more data” or to “take over the fediverse”. There’s nothing worth taking over for them currently and since most people don’t care about the fediverse I don’t see it growing much either. Although I’d certainly like it if that were the case.

They can probably get the data already, it’s all openly available. Federating it’s basically all upside and no downside for them, but it’s not exactly the biggest priority to implement it, it‘s going to take some time.

I’m not saying it might not have a negative effect or that they care a lot for what’s currently there. They’ll certainly want to monetize threads sooner or later.

Sry, I‘m still not following. I don’t understand your argument, are you saying they want to federate to gain additional users to grab data from? Because I don’t think that’s going to be a significant amount of people.

Most people don’t care about what makes the fediverse desirable to its current users, all it does is add friction to them and therefore I don’t see it growing much either.

I think the reason why meta wants to federate is this:

• it helps with anticompetitive arguments, because it’s “open” and not controlled by meta alone
• some will refuse to use anything from meta, and threads users being able to communicate with them adds value
• it won’t hurt meta, because the majority will be using their app anyways
• it helps their image

I don’t think they’re doing it to “get more data” or to “take over the fediverse”. There’s nothing worth taking over and they can probably get the data anyways, it’s all openly available. So it’s basically all upside and no downside for them.

Maybe I’m not getting something here, but neither Mastodon nor Lemmy are private, you can find everything open for everyone already, so how would federation change something there? Federation doesn’t mean everyone would use their app, so they wouldn’t gain any app usage analytics.

Also I don’t get how your metaphor make sense. The amount of fediverse users is a rounding error next to threads, instagram, WhatsApp and facebook. So there’s not a “lot a tiny things that can add up”, only a small amount of tiny things which don’t really add up to anything.

Well, I don’t think I’m the one who has to get over something, but sure. Thanks for the kind words.

Firstly, you can choose an instance that doesn’t federate with them. Everyone can choose for themselves. And second you didn’t read it probably, they’re testing it and there a handful of accounts that have activity pub enabled. That certainly doesn’t make them the biggest presence.

There’s a large number of people here that have a deeply emotional hatred for anything related to Meta and I get that. But these dull comments don’t make for a fun discussion. They don’t add anything. They won’t affect anything. They’re just boring comments wasting everyone’s time.

It’s great that everyone is able to choose for themselves

You can customize it already, but some of it is still in beta like you said.

It’s a bit different:

The new For You feed now won’t just showcase a range of popular, but diverse, accounts, but will customize its suggestions based on the user’s own “friends of friends” network. That means the content from public accounts that friends of friends follow will be surfaced in the new For You feed. - Techcrunch

There you go

What have you been mostly using them for if I may ask? And how much do you use them in general?