- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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Meta’s new Threads app is closely linked to Instagram, so much so that you can’t delete your Threads profile without deleting your Instagram account.
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This is mentioned clearly in Meta’s supplemental privacy policy, which many new Threads users failed to read in full.
I can only LOL at this. When will people realize that the majority of social media is absolute shite.
As soon as they stop believing politicians
Never it is then :(
Oh look, it’s almost as Meta is an untrustrworthy actor that plans to EEE the fediverse. I consider any instance that federates with Meta a lost cause, to be defederated as well.
What does EEE mean?
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I’m new to here so maybe I’m missing something. But why is it a problem if people from the fediverse can communicate with people on threads? It shouldnt negatively effect people on Mastodon right?
Yes the article is showing that meta likely wants to control people in annoying ways but isn’t that only an issue if you’re a Threads user? It’s cool to be able to talk with people in Threads from Mastodon as long as you don’t need threads yourself.
Of course they haven’t actually connected up threads yet as far as I know.
EEE stands for embrace, extend, extinguish. This is the embrace step, where everything is all sunshine and flowers. Actually the whole thing is sunshine and flowers, just the last step happens in that shaded area where nobody is paying attention.
But anyways, they embrace it and it seems like they are supporting the good thing.
Then they extend it with new shiny features. They are a large company and can afford to throw a bunch of developers at the project. This seems like they are doing more good, but the subtle thing is that now development outside of what they are doing is dictated to a degree by what they are doing. Sure, others can ignore the new features, but if they are important to users, doing so will mean that more users move over to their platform.
They can also adopt proprietary features that cost licensing fees to use. Or use their own. This essentially locks other devs out of those features, kinda like when a company decides to charge a ridiculous amount for access to their API, you either go along with it or you lose access to that API.
Once they have a lion’s share of the larger platform’s user base, they gain some power over the platform itself. They can start dictating things otherwise they’ll cut dissenters off.
Of course, the next question is why would this be any different from just defederating with meta right now? It mostly comes down to inertia and people getting used to things. Say your friends are on threads and you’re on some other non-meta instance. If you aren’t federated, then you have other ways of communicating with your friends that you use and are used to. But if you are federated, then maybe you use the platform to communicate with your friends. Now all of a sudden there’s a demand from meta to send Zuckerberg-compatible energy credits that would leave you defederated if your instance doesn’t comply.
In the first case, meta’s demands don’t affect you at all. In the second case, ignoring them would disrupt your routine, which will be frustrating and that frustration might get targetted at meta or maybe it will be targetted at the instance when they decide to ignore the demand and defederate. Now multiply that by thousands of users and you might be able to see how having a connection with meta might give them the power to disrupt instances they have no direct control over.
Now that said, I don’t know how much power meta will be able to build here. Personally, I already like the feature set they’ve got right now and think it only really needs tweaking. Reddit adding features to make their new site more attractive never even slightly tempted me to stop using the old site or an app that had nothing to do with the company. Maybe I’m lacking imagination, but I can’t think of any features that would both attract users en masse, would be difficult for other instances to add, and would be something that I’d personally want. And any threat to remove meta’s userbase from the fediverse sounds like threatening me with a good time.
So I lean towards defederating but not because I’m worried about meta eventually ruining this but because I think they will immediately ruin it by making it too popular. Kinda like Reddit’s growing popularity over time seemed to correlate with a decline in average quality before even taking the admins and mods into account (though I’d bet that the growing popularity also contributed to those declines as well).
The thing is, meta has a user base 100sx the size of the fediverse, and absolutely no incentive to EEE a project that is very very niche and inaccessible to a lay audience.
This!
GoogleTalk once federated with XMPP/jabber, good times until their userbase was big enough to deferedate again, crippling the jabber network. It will happen again if we let it.
Metas plan is to draw users into their network and use the fediverse as an initial catalyst (“look! so much content already there!”). Once their userbase is large enough, they will deferate again claiming protocol difficulties or something equally vague, but they will just want to start rolling out advertising which would not be displayed to users from other instances. Most users will not keep two accounts and jusy stay with the big corp and leave the original fediverse again.
I would agree with this if they weren’t brining the entire user base of instagram along with them. They just want an easy way to boost their platform’s initial content. We lose nothing if they defederate. Most people here already hate their guts and would rather die than use their platform. I’d even think some of their users may miss the fediverse and migrate over if they have to.
I think they’re using the fediverse as both a free boost of initial content and possibly as an experiment to see what it would be like if they decided to federate something even bigger: Facebook itself.
Edit: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
Wait, does it mean if you already have an Instagram account you also have a threads profile already?
Yup. Remember this when they tout how threads “already has millions of users”. They’re all zombie accounts.
That’s not true. Instagram has 1.6bn users and all can use their Instagram logins to sign in to Threads. The roughly 1% who have signed up already have chosen to activate Threads, it’s not done automatically.
I wonder if investors and advertisers will also realize this.
They probably will realise that 10 million is less than 1% of 1.6bn and that they can safely ignore people making shit up.
there are no ads yet
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Threads is basically a new feature of Instagram, they don’t even talk about it as something that is distinct from it.
Technically Meta already had everything ready for a Twitter functionality. Doesn’t make sense to copy it. Just put together a little differently.
I don’t think so, I think they are using OAuth 2.0 to create a threads account based on Instagram credentials.
Yeah aside from instagram login you don’t have to do anything for sign up
So badly designed
I don’t think so. A lot of people value their IG accounts, so it’s more of a trap. If deleting their Threads account means losing their IG account, they won’t do it.
It’s virtually impossible for this to be an accidental bug. It’s just not how it works. Building the new feature so that it can’t be switched back off but can be switched off is realistically impossible. It might be complicated to make a rollback script, but the lack of said code is a choice by management.
Yup, it’s totally a dark pattern in use.
Apparently you can deactivate your Threads profile, though. You just can’t delete it separately since it is the same account as your IG account.
Yep. True. I guess it’s just to give the users some semblance of control with their data.
I highly doubt that was an accident…
Definitely not. It’s what’s known as a “dark pattern” in the industry.
Which is why it’s still not available in Europe. They’re waiting until it has critical mass and don’t need the dark patterns anymore before rolling it out there.
Design can be made badly on purpose.
Bad designs aren’t always accidents.
Bad for whom? Not Meta.
Kill two shit-birds with one stone. Love it! #BoycottBillionaires
Win win
Hook line and sinker mate…
Hook. Line. And sinker.
Two birds, one stone.
What a loss! 😜
I’m one of those suckers who installed it to try out, but uninstalled just as quickly.
Not a single tweet or anything.
But i guess now my account is stuck there.
Or just delete your instagram account and join pixelfed instead.
There isn’t an iOS app at the moment. I tried searching on app Store. Didn’t find any.
Plus i need to be on at least one social media to be in touch with friends. I already don’t have facebook or twitter.
There is one but it’s still in TestFlight. I believe it’s supposed to be out officially by the end of the month but apple may be giving them issues. Toot from the developers
Ah. Didn’t know that. I’ll check it out once it’s stable.
There is an iOS app. It’s called vernissage. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vernissage-for-pixelfed/id1663543216
Thanks. I’ll check it out.
So a win-win, eh?
Welp, I look at Instagram maybe once a year, so there’s not much on mine.
Well now we see why it’s not available in Europe…
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Wow. Win-win!