i’ve been thinking about this for a few years now. my two cents.
ad models stop scaling with the gorwth of decentralized social protocols because no centralized entity exists to coordinate their delivery. inventory, algorithms, personalization, or even the chrome where these ads are served.
the economics are also bad. byte dance makes 50b$ plus every year but their creator fund is 200mm. spotify paid snoop dog 40k for 1B streams.
the main way to make money (and my bet) will be enabling creators to connect / monetize / build community directly with their audience rather than get disintermediated by the likes of meta and tiktok.
these will likely need to happen on different app views (web/mobile) for different nodes.
activity pub has very poor support to coordinate something at scale and build in a consistent way - something i think @atproto does very well.
i imagine meta has decided to answer the question of how to serve ads in an increasingly decentralized world and still be in control - but this may be harder than anyone thinks?
Do artists actually want that? It sounds interesting in theory but how much time do they want to spend on their art vs monetizing their fans?
Something similar is happening in book publishing where authors are getting deals that have less up front and higher revenue share. On the one hand, if there’s a breakout success then they make more money, but on the other they’re now forced to focus a lot more on monetization than the craft.
There are positives to the traditional publisher model. Maybe this is still better, I don’t know, but there are certainly tradeoffs
I expect any social media that adopts this paradigm to be immediately overwhelmed by the crypto/nft crowd and that will immediately push away most everyone else. Reddits attempt did exactly this.
Traditional publisher models if anything tend to encourage the cynical cash-grabbing algorithm chasing grift people worry about, and take too much of the artists' revenue and rights for themselves. Because of course the business of helping artists monetize is to capture as much of that monetization for yourself as possible.
Being able to pay artists directly seems like the best possible solution, but that doesn't require a business or middleman like OP. Someone can build a community and link their work to their Patreon or Kofi or something else organically.
Poor example. If I remember correctly it was a song he had a feature on and there were about a dozen people credited on the track.
For that low of a payout on 1 billion streams, you'd have to (as you said) have a lot of people on your split sheet so your royalty percentage is very low or have a terrible deal on percentage with your label, distributor, or both.
Snoop Dogg isn't living off Bic lighter endorsements. He definitely makes a lot of money on music.
I felt like the decentralized/crypto space sped run the non-profit world in that you have a lot of people who care about you and would love to "donate" to you, but after a few times they run out of "support a cause I care about" money, meaning you have to continually get new people into the audience, meaning that your life is about fundraising.
When you think about it pessimistically it's a weird one to say "I 'own' 100k followers and I am going to try to extract as much money from them as possible" which is the incentive you are creating with that model, which again, most creators out side of crypto/decentraland don't think like that.
If you take out the "extract money" bit, then you just have what they already do, which is create things on interesting platforms, which means they don't have a need for a platform that extracts money.
P.S. Also, the point about the creator funds and payouts being small completely misses the point about what these platforms do for creators. They provide distribution. What you do this that distribution is up to you. You can sell chocolate, you can make 4 billion dollars on concert tours, you can create a brand called skims that is valued at 4 billions dollars, you can create a VC fund, etc. Gating that just reduces monetization potential, which is why Facebook doesn't have a paywall. Everything else is niche and you can create fine businesses there, i.e. Patreon, but nothing huge.
Bluesky seems to be doing much better, it's more quiet which is problematic but feels much more like a blank slate, there are individual users I am following and hearing interesting things from that are not just cookie-cutter instagram posts. I am beginning to find tech people on the platform, etc.
Obligatory 'you can follow me there' I guess: https://bsky.app/profile/slimsag.com
There has been a mass exodus of journalists, celebrities, brands etc from X over the last month with their communities following. The platform has been stable and performant. And new features slowly being added but implemented well.
The phase the platform is in now is dealing with OnlyFans account, engagement farmers etc. Which is very annoying as a user but tolerable for now.
The next phase will likely come when the API they are working on is released. Then hopefully we will get all of the useful bots back.
X just had their value written down by 75% by Fidelity so the company is on track to bankruptcy unless there are big changes. BlueSky is great but made the mistake of not opening up quick enough. So Threads for me is in the best position to capitalise.
Everyone else I care about is on Bluesky and/or still on Twitter, so I've never touched Threads.
The Tech Threads community is thriving, as is Photography threads, among others.
It's not the toxic wasteland that is Twitter nowadays with Musk who spreads crazy qanon conspiracies
Hm, not sure I buy this particular argument vis a vi the Fediverse. Meta's acquistions feels like they're about acquiring growing competitors they fear will overtake them.
But Threads already usurpsed the Fediverse the day it released. It doesn't realistically have to worry about the Fediverse eating its bacon.
General comments on the article: it's not an idea I considered at all, and certainly, Meta is worth viewing with as much cynicism as you can throw at it.
> Meta can swap the protocol out with something proprietary
That feels as if that would invite regulator's immediately. Why even adopt ActivityPub if they plan on dropping it? Hell, if you want a protocol nobody is using, but you could adopt with the cover of pretending that you like openness, adopt BlueSky's ATProtocol.
Why did they adopt xmpp and then drop it?
Everyone, especially regulators, have seen on many occasions now what vendor lock-in looks like and the benefits of open standards.
edit: jinx. not very federated of them.
Really lost me here. To frame that llama is part of a strategic plan to enable a wider pool of developers really feels like a stretch. For one thing, access to gpt and copilot is already pretty reasonable compared to the price of GPUs. The code quality from open models is improving, but unless you already know quite a bit about programming, you’ll struggle to make something work.
He could have said that llama to openai is as activitypub endorsement is to x strategy wise - that could hold.
No.
Threads was not planned. Meta really really struggles with any long term execution.
Threads was the last of the "bottoms up" initiatives[0]. Had this been a properly sanctioned "bet" from the "product council"[1], they would have stuffed 200 engineers on it from the start and let them fight about scope until the money ran out (see most of the internal VR products, AR glasses, genAI, that crypto currency, market place, dating, etc)
Threads.net will never really truly be interoperable with mastodon for any particular length of time. As soon as shit like porn/spam/fraud starts to float around in high enough numbers to make someone important notice, the federation will be toned down.
Or, more likely, some "lead" engineer will want to put in a new feature to get themselves promoted and make a change that's not compatible with the wider fediverse.
Facebook cannot execute in any new market particularly well or fast. Threads was a fluke. It was one of the only self made products that actually taken off.
> But here's the question— why ActivityPub?
I suspect, and from what I've heard, is that threads is basically some horrid bastardisation of mastodon with the data store ported to facebook's internal graph store. It was done mostly for speed, so they could get something working to demo to the higher ups.
Now, that threads has numbers (so I assume) they will flood it with engineers, who will start adding useless ill-thought out featurettes that get promotions and move micro metrics, but degrade the entire platform.
[0] they are trying to steer to a central control system, but the problem is that nobody can plan. Those that can can't function because they've not been at facebook long enough to know who to wank off to get buy in.
[1]or what ever its called now, Cox's circle jerk, but less obviously taking the piss
> But he can't not grow the company. Wall Street won't allow it. And he can't grow it through acquisition because of anti-trust. He's stuck.
No, Zuck knows his bollocks are stapled to both google and apple. moreover FB/Insta have a limited shelf life. In order to survive, zuck has to own the next platform. His bet is that platform is AR/VR.
Hence why oculus is being pumped full of cash.
You will note that a shit tonne of regulation types were fired, to the point where entire departments were shut down. The push to get FB friendly regulation has largely failed, its now morphing into continuous firefighting
Their dev portal is constantly broken in different ways, it blocks you from making changes at random because it needs to run some kind of heuristics to see if you’re doing something malicious (even with webauthn 2fa).
We recently tried to get a Facebook app approved to use the pages_messaging permission. You need to have test users to pass verification. Unfortunately, you can no longer create test users on their platform since October of this year. If you try to use a real dummy user, it will get banned immediately when the application testers log in from another country.
Aside from that, you end up with corporate assets being owned by people’s personal Facebook accounts, because there’s no reasonable way to use SSO or similar. It’s just downright terrible.
I’ve used the offerings from all of the big tech companies, and Facebook/Metas is far and away the most hostile. You get what you pay for.
I will eat my hat if Meta successfully builds a cloud services platform for other tech companies given the state of their developer tooling in all their other business lines.
The bugs we do file sit in “assigned” for months, and the resolved in 30 days stat that used to be 95% is now down to the 50s.
For several years posts to Facebook Groups via API would fail if they had a dollar sign in them. Something to do with their spam and Marketplace handling black boxes.
Yet another data point for me that these huge companies just make too much money. Too insulated from the impact of bad decisions/priorities.
I assume that most Mastodon instances are run by someone who wouldn’t count as a simple end user — but for the article’s purposes, the server operators are statistically irrelevant, compared to the majority of merely-users.
People claiming it would be a huge success and would replace Twitter when it launched were already clearly a bit out of touch, anyone claiming it still has a chance to grow now is straight up delusional.
It is like the concept of hospitals being privatized businesses. It is insane when you step back and actually think about it. Do I want the doctors, nurses, janitors and staff to get paid for doing hard work at the hospital?
Absolutely! Why does an abstract entity, the financial instrument of a private hospital, need to profit off of my care?
Hey I see a bright future for companies selling the service of turnkey lemmy, mastodon, pixelfed and peertube instances so maybe Facebook can get into that and be a nice little small reasonable company helping instance admins out instead of a monstrously poorly run corporation that tears apart the social fabric of society for profit.
:)
edit wait did this article seriously just call the guy running the open source project mastodon, “CEO”…?
That is his title [0]. Other places calling him CEO include Flipboard's interview with him [1], and various tech articles [2].
[0]: His LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gargron/
[1]: https://about.flipboard.com/inside-flipboard/eugen-rochko/
[2]: https://www.wired.com/story/the-man-behind-mastodon-eugen-ro... and https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-inter...
I don’t believe this in a second. Even if an AI could cobble code together to make an entire social media platform, there is a lot that goes into building something like this. Even if you could make a Twitter clone in an hour with Firebase, you have to figure out how to get people to use your platform, which usually seems to happen because of network effects.
It’d still probably take a few months to go from 0 to fully functioning and stable twitter clone.
But it is easier than ever since you can ask llama to explain / find bugs in your code.
Asking it to write code totally from scratch is very hit or miss.
I have a really hard time believing that. To me, Threads clearly looks like Meta scrambling to take advantage of the opportunity handed to them by Twitter's self-destruction. In every way, Threads has looked unripe, slapdash.
If the "platform" was the point, then why did Threads ship without ActivityPub support?
> Martin Reece, creator of Micro.blog
It's Manton Reece. The author mostly lost me at the beginning, but here's where they totally lost me.
> Mastodon has experienced server admins and nine million users that Meta can siphon after it fully invades the platform.
Many Mastodon server admins are amateurs who are frankly not very qualified. I've had to perform two migrations (finally ending up at mastodon.social) because of incompetent and/or absentee server admins.
I used and loved app.net, but app.net was actually forced to pivot from a Twitter clone (it was a very good clone, the best ever IMO) to a "platform provider" because not enough Twitter users were wiling to abandon Twitter for app.net, so it couldn't achieve critical mass. Ironically, app.net started with the subcription model that Twitter is now trying to adopt for itself (without much success AFAIK).
Lost me there. Meta made $34B on digital advertising in Q3, if that's not a golden egg (from the investor perspective), IDK what is.
I want to see competition in this space. Facebook investing in infrastructure to sell such that new products can compete with theirs seems like it might lead to that.
If Facebook were to develop these APIs, other platform providers could also implement similar APIs for products meaning that FB wouldn't be solely in control. I'm excited about new infrastructure in this play because I think it could lead to more dynamic peer to peer interactions.
Sadly, and despite the way it was originally funded (by the users), I believe they took some VC funding, which ultimately killed the platform since it wasn't getting the growth that the investors wanted.
Actually, if Elon wants 'X' to become an 'everything app', one way which that could be done is through opening up to more app devs to build their own apps on the platform, as it used to be. Sadly, I don't think they've got the will or the manpower to do that these days.
I doubt Zuckerberg wants another social media company competing with him.
https://hachyderm.io/@timbray@cosocial.ca/111637645737943991
> Wave of anti-trans attack in progress on #threads - someone has figured out to game the algorithm so it's in a high proportion of people's “For You” feeds. Not clear if it's a moderation failure or if Threads is ok with this stuff.
