When Meta launched their new Twitter competitor Threads on July 5, they said that it would be compatible with the ActivityPub protocol, Mastodon, and all the other decentralized social networks in the fediverse “soon”.
But on July 14, @alexeheath of the Verge reported that Meta’s saying ActivityPub integration’s “a long way out”. Hey wait a second. Make up your mind already!
From the perspective of the “free fediverse” that’s not welcoming Meta, the new positioning that ActivityPub integration is “a long way out” is encouraging. OK, it’s not as good as “when hell freezes over,” but it’s a heckuva lot better than “soon.” In fact, I’d go so far as to say “a long way out” is a clear victory for the free fediverse’s cause.
So you want the users, but not them to enshittify it, but you also want them magically to come without federating because you think you have a superior sense of social media. Which reality are you in, and how do you intend for the fedi to magically become mainstream with this zero compromise dream scenario you’re coming up with? I don’t even agree with gatekeeping people you think are shitty, because there’s already a terrible fedi population out there like creepy anime instances, truth social, and kiwifarms, etc. Those are all much worse then what you’ll find on Facebook and are already on fedi. Has it ruined the network?
This is just completely idealistic hoping that wants a situation that will never happen, has already failed to happen, and is ignoring the reality of the situation. For the fedi to grow, it means also shitty people coming. That’s where the proper moderation tools become important.
What I meant by “enshittification” is this:
The linked article explains it a lot better with a specific example in my opinion, but the example is pretty long, so I just provided the quick definition from the article.
I am very much not talking about “oh no the normies are coming, polluting our beautiful pure place with memes and innocent questions about how things work that we superior people already understand.” I am also not talking about people I think are shitty, you handle that by defederating instances with a high volume of shitty people and blocking and reporting the shitty people you still come across. I really shouldn’t have said
because what I actually meant here was gatekeeping it from corporations who will try to enshittify it. Like Meta. I misspoke and I apologize for that.