There’s been a lot of speculation around what Threads will be and what it means for Mastodon. We’ve put together some of the most common questions and our responses based on what was launched today.
This reads as incredibly condescending, naive and duplicitous, filled with hubris.
For starters, the whole “yeah sure XMPP got EEE’d but who cares, only nerds cared about that, lol” is not only false (e.g. Jabber), but also does nothing to quell concerns.
Here’s an account by someone who was in the XMPP trenches when Google started adopting it.
Notice something? The “omg so cool!”, this is exactly the same as Rochko.
It’s the hubris when you’re a FOSS maintainer who toiled away for years without recognition and now a $700B+ corporation is flattering him by wanting to use/interact with his work.
Then there’s the fact that Rochko is extremely tight lipped about the off the record meeting with Meta and consistently refuses to deny having received funds from Meta and refuses to pledge not to accept any funds from Meta.
I genuinely think the dude is just so hyped for the perceived recognition, that he lost the thread.
So much so that he thinks Mastodon is untouchable.
And it’s extremely naive to think that Meta has benevolent motives here or that Mastodon will survive any schemes Meta might have.
What’s more realistic is that Mastodon will die because people will flock to Threads if their social graph has moved over.
Similarly these lofty and naive ideas that people on Threads will make the switch to Mastodon once they get a taste of what it has to offer.
So now all of a sudden the “difficulty” to get started in Mastodon, that is keeping people who want a polished corporate experience away isn’t going to be an issue?
Especially when in the “extinguish” phase Meta will have siloed off from Mastodon and its portability function, having to leave their social graph behind?
It’s all so increasingly naive, one can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional sabotage at this point.
Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality.
Sure perhaps years from now a few hundred to a few thousand people might still use it, but it will be as irrelevant as XMPP is to most people, and Rochko with it.
Data scraping
Meta is an ad company and tries to collect as much data from anyone. They are known to make shadow graphs of people not even in their network to try and know as much about as many people possible. This is their business model so they will do it to the fedi.
Moneyed interests
They are going to compensate instances that federate with them, which turns people that run instances from volunteers into business owners. From there they can try and dilute admins further into showing ads etc.
Sucking users from the fediverse
They will make it easy to get in (import with history when mastodon does not support it), hard to get out (if you go, you can’t take your posts) and will hold your connections hostage against you (we will stop fedarating with the other instances now, so if you want to connect to your friends you have to have a threads account, sorry not sorry).
That and basically all the shit big corps do like make people angry and hacking people’s brains to stay on the site for as long as fucking possible. Which they are 100% going to try to do here regardless of our intentions.
This reads as incredibly condescending, naive and duplicitous, filled with hubris.
For starters, the whole “yeah sure XMPP got EEE’d but who cares, only nerds cared about that, lol” is not only false (e.g. Jabber), but also does nothing to quell concerns.
Here’s an account by someone who was in the XMPP trenches when Google started adopting it.
Notice something? The “omg so cool!”, this is exactly the same as Rochko.
It’s the hubris when you’re a FOSS maintainer who toiled away for years without recognition and now a $700B+ corporation is flattering him by wanting to use/interact with his work.
The blog is a far cry from the anti-corporate tone in the informational video from 2018.
Then there’s the fact that Rochko is extremely tight lipped about the off the record meeting with Meta and consistently refuses to deny having received funds from Meta and refuses to pledge not to accept any funds from Meta.
There’s also the unsatisfactory answer he gave to people who started questioning some dubious sponsors and the fact that he rushed to lock the thread, killing any further discussion.
I genuinely think the dude is just so hyped for the perceived recognition, that he lost the thread.
So much so that he thinks Mastodon is untouchable.
And it’s extremely naive to think that Meta has benevolent motives here or that Mastodon will survive any schemes Meta might have.
What’s more realistic is that Mastodon will die because people will flock to Threads if their social graph has moved over.
Similarly these lofty and naive ideas that people on Threads will make the switch to Mastodon once they get a taste of what it has to offer.
So now all of a sudden the “difficulty” to get started in Mastodon, that is keeping people who want a polished corporate experience away isn’t going to be an issue?
Especially when in the “extinguish” phase Meta will have siloed off from Mastodon and its portability function, having to leave their social graph behind?
It’s all so increasingly naive, one can’t help but wonder if it’s intentional sabotage at this point.
Mark my words, this’ll be the end of Mastodon especially when Meta can outspend Mastodon all day every day to add proprietary functionality.
Sure perhaps years from now a few hundred to a few thousand people might still use it, but it will be as irrelevant as XMPP is to most people, and Rochko with it.
@remindme@mstdn.social in 2 years.
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The problems I personally have with Meta are:
That and basically all the shit big corps do like make people angry and hacking people’s brains to stay on the site for as long as fucking possible. Which they are 100% going to try to do here regardless of our intentions.
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