I don’t really think federating with them is doomsday, tbh (though I go back and forth on this one), but that doesn’t affect my primary reason for my nope. Threads consolidates everything I hate about corporate social media–and for that matter, all social media–without a single part I actually liked and made dealing with the other parts worth it. This is not a twitter clone; it’s like someone asked chatGPT to create a social media network based on twitter for other chatGPT bots to talk to each other. For fuck’s sake, it doesn’t think its users should control what they see on their own feed.
I am perfectly willing–even eager–to perform melodramatically about things that annoy me in public for fun and when I’m bored and applaud others doing the same; it’s fun times for all and possibly my favorite thing ever. This is not that.
Threads makes my skin crawl on concept. This is not ‘they do not align with our values’ because come on, Fediverse contains a multitude of values and invents more and i bet if asked, everyone here would list off a different set of values they believe encompass Fediverse and now I’m tempted to see because it would be hilarious. But we can’t even get that far; Threads has no values. This would be a marriage of convenience to a real doll fueled by Facebook’s algorithms and sponsored by Wal-Mart; whether or not it’s a danger to Fediverse shouldn’t even have come up because the first question that should be on anyone’s minds is ‘wait, this is actually a serious question?’ and have been answered ‘lol of course it’s a joke, I just forgot to add the /s’.
I’ve actually just asked that in another post, because I am kind of interested in what people see as Fediverse main idea.
But, thanks for this summary of how Threads looks like, since I’m avoiding it like a plague. You seriously can’t even select what content you see? Fuck, that’s way worse than I though - that’s so obviously a ML model manipulating with people without holding anything back. I hope they’ve at least done something with the misalingment where it seems to just radicalize people to keep them on the platform, because if not, the world is fucked.
Fortunately I have never had instagram and have a policy of never, ever using my wallet name online except as needed (exception: usenet my first year online; I was young and reckless). LinkedIn and Facebook were quite literally because a.) grandparents and other family, b.) my job, and c.) I realized early on that I needed an official web presence under my real name because there would be questions if there wasn’t something out there.
So I made an instagram account then made a threads account, got a friend who had it to follow me, and did a quick dive.
I mean, it’s literally a minimalist twitter real doll; I deactivated to keep my name intact, logged out, and deleted instagram and Threads on the phone in under five minutes and took a shower because I never realized the uncanny valley applied to an app’s aesthetic. It’s just–I mean, no. No no no.
Yeah, exactly. I don’t have Facebook, Instagram, etc. because I hate them as an online experience. I’m here because it’s not that kind of experience. If the fediverse turns into the type of experience meta imposes on its users, I would just have to hope that something else alternative that I like pops up.
Trust me, they’ve taken any knowledge their new ex Twitter employees had about radicalizing people to keep them on the platform and integrated it fully.
Out of curiosity I tried it for a few minutes yesterday. All I saw was a bunch of influencers and low level memes. I had duck duck go tracker blocker on just to see how bad they are and it’s worse than I could ever imagine. It showed 686 tracker attempts from 35 different companies and I was only on for about 10 minutes.
And that’s another issue - if we federate, you won’t even be able to block those trackers, because the Meta instance will just be able to ask the server for those data, if I understood it correctly.
I think defederating from them is a no-brainer for the fediverse, but who am I? Just a user of the fediverse. I do not own an instance. I choose the fediverse over meta and its facebook crap, so for me it’s a no-brainer. For owners of instances, maybe it isn’t such an easy decision. It costs money to run an instance, for example. Federating with the Facebook corporate goons at first will seem useful to some instances, especially the big ones that want to stay big and general. When the big and general ones that fall for Meta’s scheme to take control of things, the smaller instances on the fediverse that chose to defederate will be there to join.
I’ve been thinking on that and assuming fosstodon and lemmy.world both agree to defederate with Threads, I’m going to go ahead and set up regular donations. I only use DW a few times a year, but I renew my premium membership every six months and it’s not cheap. I want to keep supporting it because its model does not include ads at all (premium gives you lots of icons, too, and I used to be a huge icon person, so I can’t say that’s not a consideration). Unless I lose my job or something, I’ll keep paying until death or dw closes whether I ever use it again; it’s worth supporting.
I was already considering it–when i joined mastodon I bought their stickers to show my appreciation–but this is been a wake-up call. If lemmy.world decides to federate, I mean, I’m not going to leave, but I am going to email lemmy.ml about why my application is still pending and use that for my primary.
It’s just the way federations work. I think a lot of people are worried because it’s a new type of social media with a different structure. You don’t have to rely on one place anymore to socialize online, you can pick and choose what you want to connect to. If you don’t like one style, you can pick another style. The thing that worries me is whether or not there different styles will continue to exist or if one entity will monopolize everything. The nice thing is that most modern democratic countries have laws about monopolies and they do in fact work. Several monopolies have been avoided or eliminated in the past.
What is the threat? Isn’t it good that the fediverse is becoming more mainstream? If thread users can communicate with us, it will be easier for them to join us.
It’s only my personal point of view, but have you ever seen how does a Meta user usually communicates? Can you imagine a moderating an instance where you suddenly get an influx of 3 billion users? None of them will ever create an account outside of the Meta ecosystem, and will only bring problems to most of the other instances, while making any kind of moderation a living hell.
The threat mainly is a corporation looking to assert itself within the fediverse in an attempt to kill it’s growth with eventual incompatibilities. Personally, I don’t have a dog in this fight, but it’s been interesting to watch.
I disagree with the prevailing sentiment here. Meta using ActivityPub is going to help ActivityPub grow an will be good for federated platforms like lemmy, and mastadon.
Lemmy should not block threads.net. Individual users can simply opt out of using threads, but it’s good if we can communicate with people using it and they can communicate with us using a decentralized, free, standard.
I mean maybe, but I can’t help to feel a little like this is optimistic speculation, while I’ve read very well-written arguments for blocking threads.net that seem less (albeit still) speculative. I just don’t want to lose what we have, and if we really want to keep growing then we can do so without Meta.
and if we really want to keep growing then we can do so without Meta.
No we cannot. This website is barely usable. The average person doesn’t want to use lemmy. They want to hear what their favorite musicians and athletes are up to. They want to use a service that has a massive user base so they can learn new things from experts in various niche fields, etc. They don’t want to go to a website with 1000 people who all share the same unpopular political views.
By joining with threads, we make it easier for this average person to switch over to lemmy or mastadon. There is literally no downside to federating with them. They can’t shut down smaller instances.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is the fear. Other companies have done it with other open standards, it’s a fantastic way for corporations to kill decentralized solutions.
Proprietary/centralized ones just get bought out early on before they capture a large market share. Activitypub has 15 million users on it now, and since it’s not a single company that Meta can buy out, they need an alternative approach to destroy it.
Google is pretty trash now and has been for a while to be honest. The removal of features such as using quotation marks for an exact search was part of the downfall. Now Google will basically only show you what it thinks you want and you have minimal (if any) ways around it.
That’s not to say I don’t also agree with you about DDG. The results are leveraged from Bing, which are pretty lacking for some standard searches. You have to search a little differently than you would with Google for better results and filter through more junk websites.
If I had to grade the quality of both, Google would probably be a C+ and DDG a C.
That being said I always use DDG first since I don’t think it’s far off from Google’s quality, it is privacy preserving and still has some features that were nixed from Google. It also has the option to use ‘!g’ in a search to immediately search for the same terms but on Google which helps when their results aren’t working for me.
Ultimately, to each their own but I thought I’d throw in my experiences.
I’ve always thought that Google knows what I want because Google knows how I’d ask for what I want. It wasn’t the first but for sure the longest time I have used a search engine. It’s hard to break free from habits.
For many years I’ve been trying to default DDG just to use the !g all the time and eventually get fed up and switch back. But besides YT Family the search is the only thing left.
This year I haven’t changed it back (yet) although occasionally I do use it, mostly for local searches. Even with adblockers and all, G is prioritizing sites I have already been on, and often I need some new perspectives in my searches. DDG feels like I have to keep my mind sharp, sometimes that means rewording what I want.
I’ve started using Kagi, has better results, supports bangs, can rank websites in results (for example I used to have Reddit links ranked higher 😞) and many cool futures. Only downsides for me is that it costs, they offer free, 200 or 500 searches maybe? Then it’s $5/month for a limited number of searches and a $10/month plan as well.
The bloat in modern software is just incredible, meanwhile there’s very little new functionality for the users. Things just get slower and buggier as opposed to better in any tangible terms.
512KiB for a game ? Pfffff In the 80’s they ran Elite on a computer that have half of that on RAM A game that simulated the economy of galaxies and rendered 3d graphics !
It’s an impressive game, 100%, but I don’t think the comparison is quite so straightforward. Pokemon had only 8 KB working RAM, 4 shades of colour, and the cart only had 373 KiB stored on it. But the GameBoy CPU was over double the speed of the of the BBC Micro or the Acorn Electron.
Both are really impressive games for their size; though Elite’s no doubt more impressive for its time given Pokemon Red/Green released after 5 years of development to an already quite aged handheld, and ended up undergoing a full revision to patch out the bugs with Pokemon Blue version a half year later.
I think the real king is ET, a multicolor game with a layered gameworld, and detailed graphics on just a 1.2MHz CPU, 128 bytes of RAM, with less than 6KB on the cartridge. The game made a few mistakes that cost it any recognition, but it’s a really impressive game given its hardware and time.
They show up in Hot too. Probably because someone on this server loaded the post to make that comment, so it got imported to the server. I guess Hot sorts based on (score and) “new to me”, not “new”.
lemmy.ml
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