Yes. Has been for a while. But only if Threads users opt into it. Of course the things Meta doesn’t actually want you to do is opt-in, and everything else is either opt-out or not an option at all.
mastodon.social, the “default” instance federates. If you have an account there you can see zuckerberg’s profile with this link: mastodon.social/@zuck/ without an account this redirects to threads
I’m not so sure. I talked to some people who knew about threads, a couple even had accounts. These are not tech oriented people. Moreover, I quite often see memes/screenshots of bluesky posts right here.
Make of that what you will. I have no numbers or anything, but it seems like they’re not as dead as we might think.
They arent dead, but they are in the millions of users, not hundreds of millions.
That is enough to sustain a social media platform, but none of them fully have the network effect going for them yet.
With federation, hopefully they won’t need it. That can be the network effect once interoperability is really here. Then everyone can still communicate, but not be beholden to any one service/owner/etc.
It’s not hard to find out. It uses their own AT protocol. I don’t know if there’s a list but if I open the app, pretty much everyone I see is running on a federated server…
Well, what's a popular server? Are there several big ones? Sorry, but I really don't understand why the answer isn't turning up in web search results.
PS: Are you sure it isn't just people who've done the "set your domain as your handle" thing but even so are still on the central one? Because even if they have made some small progress towards decentralization they absolutely have not gone so far that there isn't still a central one.
Further searching turns up the information that "federated" Bluesky PDS instances are limited to ten user accounts each, and API usage limits which may constrain things further. So that would explain why there aren't any big ones.
So far as I can tell they do all still "federate" through the central server, not directly with each other. So there being not much point in it may also explain why it hasn't caught on.
AT protocol doesn’t federate the way ActivityPub does. There are separations between how your dat is stored, how it is aggregated, how it is filtered, and how it is displayed. Each part can be hosted separately and federate differently with separate instances of each part. The aggregation part is the thing that is most critical and there are probably some limited independent instances of that, but BlueSky has offered no support in facilitating this beyond making their peices AT Protocol compliant. You van take what BlueSky built and try to run your own instance of the aggregation service but they provide no documentation or support. You could also build your own, but that’s difficult and I don’t think anyone is trying.
So it is federated, but pretty much no one is interested in doing the work to federate with the primary infrastructure.
I dont want any parts of Threads. But if they’re gonna federate, at least do it 100%. This half-ass, piecemeal approach where they release an itty bitty teeny weeny change every month is weird.
Indicates to me the decision to do ActivityPub was bolted on very late in the project’s lifecycle, probably rushed to try to take the users flocking away from Twitter.
Because a lot of those limitations makes zero sense.
In Europe we have rules, regulations and consumer protections because our respective countries and the collective union actually give a shit about the people that live here.
The European Commission used its statement to detail its concern “that Microsoft may have granted Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice whether or not to acquire access to Teams when they subscribe to their SaaS productivity applications. This advantage may have been further exacerbated by interoperability limitations between Teams’ competitors and Microsoft’s offerings. The conduct may have prevented Teams’ rivals from competing, and in turn innovating, to the detriment of customers in the European Economic Area.”
I doubt that you’re interested in arguing in good faith, but if by some miracle you do care about having an informed opinion before opening your mouth, how would you respond to things like this?
This essentially killed my (EU-based) startup in the project management and collaborate space. Before MSFT bundled Teams with O365 we were rapidly growing and closing enterprise customers in the automotive, energy and education industries with high retention rates. Right around the time the Teams bundling started our retention dropped, churn went through the roof, growth slowed down, we failed to raise our next round because of it and had to drastically downsize the company, causing even more churn (about 80% net churn in 2 years). This move by the EU is good, but too little too late - 99% of the companies that were hurt by this have already shut down, and the ones still running will take years to recover…
There are many reasons vc’s fail and just as many excuses. 2 paragraphs with no mentions of slack, workspaces, hipchat, discord, etc is far from an analysis of an uncompetitive field and product
Teams offers voice, chat, call queues and routing, telephony and traditional voip including international regions, along with saml, log shipping, and DLP. And they are charging $5/mo in a revenue positive service. So, to answer your question, I would reserve my judgment for something more substantial than a failed CEOs single rant on hacker news.
I would be more supportive if there were more products that could compete on base features before we talk about integration, as well as seeing a non profitable service eg loss leading.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft tried to hold off these anti-trust lawsuits by intentionally making the interoperability and feature-parity between its products shockingly bad.
Multiple features of their infotainment are there but softlocked out, the engines on the more powerful trim levels aren’t different or tuned, it’s just a different ecu map, etc.
I have observed that myself with the infotainment system of my 2017 Golf Alltrack, but when did they start software derating their engines? My understanding is that there’s nothing much to be gained from an aftermarket ECU tune unless I switch to premium gas and the more powerful Golf models have other real differences like bigger turbochargers.
Personally, I’m happy to see regulations that hold megacorps to the spirit and intent of those regulations, rather than having a dozen loopholes they can pass through. The lawyers are of course unhappy since they can’t argue in court that they met the absolute minimum letter of the law.
Thank you, this gets to the core of the problem. Exorbitant amounts of money and effort is spent to find where the letter of the law does not match the spirit of the law. Language is messy, so it never completely will. But in cases where the spirit of the law is so obvious I’m happy when it’s enforced instead of letting them off on technicalities.
Should a DMA violation be repeated, fines can reach up to 20 percent of global annual revenue.
That’s over a thousand dollars!
Throughout the past several months, Apple has made a number of changes to comply with bypass the DMA
Fixed that for them
We are confident our plan complies with the law,
It most likely doesn’t.
and estimate more than 99 percent of developers would pay the same or less in fees to Apple under the new business terms we created.
Translation: current fleecing levels will remain
All developers doing business in the EU on the App Store have the opportunity to utilize the capabilities that we have introduced, including the ability to direct app users to the web to complete purchases at a very competitive rate.
You’re still free to pay us for using the cheaper services provided by others.
As we have done routinely, we will continue to listen and engage with the European Commission.”
We’re paying close attention to find out how best to bypass the law without paying the fines
delaying the rollout of Apple Intelligence — the company’s name for a suite of generative AI features that will debut in iOS 18 — and some other features in the EU. “We are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security,” the company told Bloomberg.
Translation: they won’t let us monetize every tiny bit of data with no compensation or even notice
Fuck Apple. Fuck their walled garden profiteering bullshit. FUCK their blatant lies about it.
I know, I was just being silly for the sake of being silly on that one heh.
Fining Apple tens of billions of dollars is genuinely a great start towards making it not financially viable for them to break the law, so I’m all for it!
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