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What should we do about Threads?
(programming.dev)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Threads is a Twitter competitor. Same applies to Mastodon.
Twitter is only useful because companies, celebrities amd politicians embrace it. Nobody cares about ordinary Twitter users. Twitter is a platform for networking with people in the industry and announcing stuff to customers.
Mastodon right now is not an alternative to Twitter, because there is practically nobody important there.
Threads has better chances to overcome this and has already in a few hours pulled more VIPs onto their platform, than Mastodon in multiple years.
This seems right. So what do you propose doing?
I am pro-fediverse, so I guess making Mastodon atleast as easy to use as Threads is a must.
If you look at statistics, Mastodon always gains a massive amount of users, when Twitter does something stupid. Most of these also return back to Twitter, the moment they realize, that Mastodon has no VIPs.
If Threads integrates well with ActivityPub, then people on Mastodon will be more likely to stay, because Threads gives fediverse users access to the VIPs, that they used Twitter for in the first place. This stops people from leaving Mastodon in the short term.
In the long term Mastodon needs to advertise itself to younger people, because nowadays this is the only way for new social media platforms to establish themselves.
That's how TikTok, SnapChat and Instagram became popular. This would make Mastodon fresh, while Twitter would transform into a graveyard like facebook.
Also having more tech companies, media orgs, cultural orgs, universities and maybe even governments host their instances, would make the federated aspect stronger and the whole fediverse more scalable.
Interesting. In this debate I keep going back and forth, mainly because of the XMPP precedent, but I basically agree with your pragmatic priors.
Your last point is so true. Actually I can't help feeling a bit of schadenfreude about all those well-meaning organizations and VIPs and whole governments that went all-in on proprietary platforms and now find themselves on super uncool sinking ships or controversy-laden fiascos. I mean, what was some regional government or university doing on Twitter in the first place?! Same thing for Whatsapp literally replacing phone numbers in many countries. I mean, this is a single private company FFS, you have no control over anything, yet apparently most people and organizations still cannot see the problem - incredible. This is why we always need protocols and standards. It was obvious all along. Anyway, forgive the rant, I agree with your take.
What XMPP precident? XMPP is great and I use it everyday. Is that what you're talking about?
Well, either you must use it to talk to yourself or your contacts must all be in a tech bubble. Unless I am terribly mistaken, an arbitrary XMPP client cannot be used to talk to people on the proprietary networks where most of them are these days.
I use it to IM people on http://sine.space among others regularly. Many of whom are completely non-techy. The problem with people pretending that XMPP was embraced extended and extinguished. Is that it was never the case. If Google killed XMPP. Then it must have also killed AOL instant messenger, MSN instant messenger, ICQ, etc. It didn't. But no one uses them anymore hardly either.
The truth of the matter is that no one used Google talk for XMPP. Other than mostly techie people who are already using XMPP. It's base of use definitely increased when people started using Google talk. But only technically. And when Google stop supporting it. It technically went back to normal. Where it is now. The fact is it was good but never popular. And other more featured services replaced it and all the services like it. But it's still exists today quietly. And in a lot of places people would never suspect it still.
Interesting. You may have a poiint.
Yes I'm all for going after Google for different things. And was definitely a big fan when they implemented it into Google talk. But I think it's importance was definitely overplayed.
An in-law of mine wrote a commercial email consolation web service about a decade ago. Which he eventually sold off or a smart chunk of money. But he implemented an on-site instant messaging capability using XMPP. It was never broadly advertised as such. But you could absolutely connect to it through an XMPP client outside the website. But unfortunately not many of the actual users cared about that beyond the fact that it works for them. However I would not be surprised if many of these customer service on site chat applications etc don't use some level of XMPP. We're just not advertised about it.
I believe XMPP today is an IETF standard. Which anyone can and probably do implement. I remember reading about it having integration with SIP servers etc. unfortunately though it was never one of those sexy exciting things that people really look for. It's why Mastodon etc I haven't really blown up but are still chugging along. Most people only care that the people they want to talk to are there and able to be talked to. Not about how it happens in the background or even what they have to give in exchange for it. And I honestly think it is one of the reasons that Lemmy might actually stand a chance. Reddit by its nature was often rather techy and involved. Growing communities is much different than growing personal walled gardens. And if money does a good job of appealing to those community maintainers. I could see general chatters eventually following. Because no one wants to waste time screaming into an unmoderated void.
Some interesting insights here, thanks. I hope you're right.
I think one of the biggest things we can do is identify ways to fight bots. One thing has become clear to me, and that's that Reddit and Twitter are stuffed to the gills with bots and professional trolls. I haven't seen a small fraction of the rage engagement here that I did on Reddit, and I'm guessing that the reason alt-right and other extremist messages echo so hard on these platforms is that they really drive rage engagement. These platforms eat it up, because any engagement is good engagement. I worry that Threads will represent an absolute Tsunami of bot-driven garbage and ragebait being broadcast to federated servers.
FSVO VIP.