this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Hard agree.
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'm still waiting for that /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.
I hate Meta so much...
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.
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.
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.
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.