Flipboard Begins to Federate (opens in new tab)

The present moral outrage is over the Threads ToS stating that if your account interacts with or receives a Threads post in any way, Meta will scrape all available data about your account to build a shadow profile of you for tracking and advertising purposes. I'm not even paraphrasing, they're very explicit about it.

Which is exactly the thing people were afraid of when Threads was first announced.

But really the core issue is that most people on mastodon are there specifically to avoid corporate social media. They don't want to be tracked, spied on, or advertised to. The vast majority of accounts are pseudonymous and they like it that way. Privacy is a foundational core value of the fediverse in general.

Many people see the idea of allowing Meta into the fediverse as the antithesis of every value that the fediverse was built on. Which makes sense, as the fediverse was built specifically as a way to escape Meta, google, and their ilk. There is a very real fear that Meta will attempt to destroy federated social media; what possible reason would they have to not? There's absolutely no incentive for them to allow the status quo, and every incentive to destroy a competitor.

But don't downplay the extreme seriousness of the debate. Fediverse users and admins are pretty split on this issue and argument and discussion happens every day. This is not something most people take lightly, and most treat it very, very seriously.

Personally, I run my own server because I find the endless debate tiring and distasteful. I'll block the meta domain based on their ToS because I'm on mastodon specifically for privacy and anonymity.

Once upon a time you could follow someone's public Facebook posts from any RSS reader you liked, whether or not you had an account. Now the only way to follow someone's Facebook posts is to have an account there. And Facebook will probably only show you a small fraction of the posts by the people you actually follow, sorted by what Meta thinks is most likely to make Meta money.

If you trust Meta to not follow a similar playbook with Threads, you are much more optimistic than I am.

I run a small Mastodon instance, and have preemptively defederated from Threads because I do not want Meta to suck in my posts for free and use them as something to spread apart Meta ad views. I've informed my users of this and so far everyone with a reply has praised this decision. They have made choices.

In fact lately there have been waves of spam from the big open-registration instances. I and a lot of other small instance admins I know have responded by limiting our federation with these instances. This creates a slightly worse experience for our users, in that they're likely to stop seeing media from big-instance accounts they follow. And it creates choice - do they talk to their friends on the big instances and say "hey can I persuade you to move to an instance that isn't a spam gateway?" Does the friend say "yes" and acquire an invitation to a closed-registration instance that's well-federated to their friend network? Eventually we end up with multiple networks all on ActivityPub that have very few connections. And this is fine. Because people can also do things like choose to have multiple accounts on these multiple networks.

It's less "Meta evil" and more, "We've been burned by 3E countless times." This just looks like the first E.

The problem is that the incentives to engage in the two remaining Es still exist, and given the same incentives, we can predict the same behavior. It's Econ101.

Maybe we want it to be a niche place?

Also, the effect of Google's presence on XMPP was huge, see https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...

What do you mean it "takes away choice"? Did you mean "imposes annoying bureaucracy"? Because I have a hard time seeing how forcing people to make a choice is taking away choice.

Also, the people who have accounts away from the big instances have actively declined to use them, so they are clearly more likely to move to some other mid scale instance if they need to migrate than to head for the big ones.

Threads has (as of late last week) enabled federation for a small set of employee accounts. Here's a federated post; it doesn't look like comments and likes are federating: https://mastodon.world/@mosseri@threads.net/1115866154367492...

I don't think most instance owners will block them. The larger servers I've paid attention to don't plan to at this time, though many people have expressed concerns about it being an attempt by Meta to embrace, extend, and extinguish the Fediverse. A few people are very loud about not wanting a Meta presence and are trying to convince others to block them.

I think the opportunity outweighs the threat. There's a chance for Mastodon and others to show their software to a mainstream audience which has already shown a willingness to try out new social software by joining threads. Ideally, some projects will have a better pitch than just "we're not corporate".

I don't fully understand what federation means for something like Threads and Mastodon.

Will I be able to follow various users across the Fediverse and view all their posts in the Threads app, or will I just be able to sign in to their servers with my threads account?

> Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil".

Isn't this what Gmail and Microsoft do with their approach to spam blocking?

If I want to see "what's trending now" on Threads, I'll call them, they don't have to call me.

The answer ranges from "basically impossible" to "trivial" depending on what layer of the OSI model you think the "current internet" exists on.

How long is a rope?

There is already a bunch of "completely detached" networks out there, organized via wifi links. Freifunk, Guifi and NYC Mesh are three examples of such networks, where you can basically avoid the current internet infrastructure as long as you get hooked up to the mesh network. Lots of interesting services deployed on these networks too :)

I think Project Gemini fits this description: https://geminiprotocol.net/

> How hard is it to create another “internet” which is completely detached from the current internet?

Seems like a good way to explain the meaning "network effect".

Well FB has lost $20bn and counting on Horizon Worlds and other "new internet" projects. Before building anew, it's important to consider how many people want to leave the current one.

Sounds like an "Ask HN" to me.

> But... it's still not easy enough for non-nerds to get onboard.

I made several attempts to get onboard with Mastodon about a year ago when I stopped using Twitter. I used a tool to copy over as many people I follow on Twitter to Mastodon.

Technically, it's fine. The issue I have is that it felt exactly the same as Twitter, and I always disliked Twitter.

However, Twitter had reached a network effect threshold where most of the news in my industry was shared exclusively there, so I was... well not quite forced, but strongly compelled to use it.

Mastodon doesn't have this. It's just noise and thoughtless hot takes, much like Twitter, but without most of the news I used to use Twitter for. I hope it doesn't become another Twitter where I feel compelled to wade through the mess to get my industry news.

To sum up: for me the reason I don't use Mastodon is not technical. It's because it feels useless and I dislike it. I had hoped for a more thoughtful arena of public discourse, but Mastodon is not it. All the interesting tech aside, it's just a Twitter clone using different technology.

> I want to be able to follow interesting content from the kind of people who are put off by language like "first, select your federated instance".

But not put off by language like, first select Threads, Flipboard or Automattic?

Can these people fog a mirror?

https://flipboard.com/@theverge doesn't work for me. I have to change it to https://flipboard.com/users/theverge.

As a nerd, Mastodon wasn’t useful for me. All of my friends are on Snapchat or Instagram, so my mastodon social account sat with zero followers, which means if I post something there is no engagement from anyone and unlikely anyone would see it.

I’m not an online personality by any means, so no followers makes sense.

I think Mastodon is great for people who exist online, just not so much people who exist in real life. I don’t mean any insult by that, just the way it is right now.

I think it is definitely easy enough, but it's just not as intrinsically addictive.

Happens everywhere, even on my Google News Feed. I can tell Google I don't want to see specific articles, authors, topics, etc., but there's no way for me to tell Google that I don't want to see Clickbait article titles...

Exactly what I was just thinking, had no idea it was still alive. Twitter took its place for me but now even that has been ruined.

Happened to Pocket as well. I guess with every worthwhile site putting up paywalls, that's the kind of content we get for free.

uh, isn't it an rss client? Can't you just add what you want to it?

As someone who never really used XMPP, was it worse off after Google compared to before? I mean sure a ton of users lost access to XMPP after they ended support, but surely most of them never would have used XMPP in the first place.

That I had to scroll this far to find this comment means y’all have forgotten your history…

What does Flipboard have to do with Samsung?

FWIW, Medium doesn’t have login walls and hasn’t for a long time. Stories are either paywalled or they aren’t (author’s choice). This link is not paywalled and doesn’t require login.

You can look at how email is monetized for some ideas. Everything from ad infested free client to pay service to freebie with the purchase of your internet connection.

I suppose you could have an 'Apollo' style app providing a nice UI for power users with a subscription cost. I could see it being a solid revenue stream for small teams/indie makers. Difficult to get to the kind of scale needed for advertising to be particularly profitable unless we get some kind of federated facebook ads platform...

Same here. It was one of those things I loaded on the 1st gen iPad and considered a possible killer app for a new and innovative way to get news content.

Glad to see it's still around and doing something like this. Will be checking it out again.

The Fediverse is a breath of fresh air because it's not crawling with ads and low quality writing. Flipboard is basically announcing that they're going to put an end to that. Their list of partner publications is like a who's who of blogspam.

"By posting it, you give us permission to use your content to do what we reasonably believe necessary to improve and provide our service both now and in the future. For example, this may include storing, displaying, reproducing and distributing your content on Flipboard’s website, mobile application, our social web integrations, and any future offerings. This might also include providing or promoting your content with partner companies or services for broader broadcast, redistribution or publication via Flipboard."

https://about.flipboard.com/terms-of-service/