In order for the open social web to happen at scale, lots of companies and apps, big and small, need to adopt #ActivityPub. Threads is the largest player so far to do this and the implications are huge.

Why is #Threads doing this? Is federation just another feature or is it foundational to their entire experience? How is the Threads team thinking about moderation, monetization and privacy in these early days and going forward?

I asked @rklambo and @pcottle, two thoughtful and genuine leaders on the Threads team who joined me on the latest episode of #DotSocial. Check it out on our #PeerTube instance or wherever you get your podcasts.

https://flipboard.video/w/2q29uCjnHjot1CHu1CZBim

Flipboard Video

2024-04-22 15:47:35

Threads Has Entered the Fediverse, with Meta’s Rachel Lambert and Peter Cottle

On March 21, Meta’s Threads entered the fediverse. This means that people on other ActivityPub-powered platforms, like Mastodon, can follow federated Threads profiles and see, like, reply to, and repost posts from the fediverse. (Eventually, you’ll be able to follow other fediverse accounts from Threads, too.) It’s still early days, but Threads’ entry shows the ecosystem coming together at a larger scale, starting with the promise of interoperability.

Threads’ presence in the fediverse has been the elephant in the room since it was announced in July 2023. Now that it’s actually happening, there is as much skepticism as excitement. Why is Meta doing this? How are they working with the community to get it right? And what do they have to say about concerns about their involvement?

In this episode of Dot Social, Flipboard CEO Mike McCue talks to two key leaders tasked with building the Threads experience: Rachel Lambert, Director of Product Management, and Peter Cottle, Software Engineer. Both are long-time Meta employees with a genuine care for open-source software and communities, as well as trust and safety. In fact, Rachel launched the Oversight Board, which helps Meta be accountable for trust and safety decisions across its social apps.

Highlights of this conversation include:

1:21 Reasons why is Meta entering the fediverse with Threads
3:30 How foundational is the fediverse for Threads (vs being more like a feature)?
5:25 Were AT protocol or other protocols ever in consideration, or was ActivityPub always the protocol you knew you’d use?
6:35 Benefits of larger companies adopting new technologies
8:07 More choice and voting with your feet, plus product development upside
9:06 Reactions from users, creators, the fediverse
12:15 Who’s federated that they’re excited about
13:27 The next steps in Threads’ federation
15:55 Addressing concerns about Meta in the fediverse
19:45 Could the concept of federation apply to other areas of Meta?
20:34 Privacy settings: Threads veers public
21:09 Addressing concerns around moderation and inviting in toxicity
25:57 Empowering instance admins; leveraging Meta toolkit for moderation?
27:49 Moderation at the protocol level, refined tools, expectation setting
30:00 Concerns over surveillance economy emerging in the fediverse; concerns over privacy and data
33:24 Evangelizing federation: Patreon, paid access models for creators?
35:55 Spirit of collaboration and community-building

🔎 You can follow Rachel at @[url=https://threads.net/ap/users/17841400104589170/]Rachel Lambert[/url] and Peter at @pcottle@threads.net

✚ You can follow Mike on Mastodon at @[url=https://flipboard.social/users/mike]Mike McCue[/url] and @[url=https://flipboard.com/users/mike]Mike McCue[/url], and on Threads at @mmccue@threads.net

💡 To learn more about what Flipboard's doing in the Fediverse, sign up here: http://about.flipboard.com/a-new-wave

appdownload.flipboard.com/a-new-wave/

^{about.flipboard.com}

It’s a Thing!

Das Fediverse tut sich schwer, das volle Potential der verschiedenen Activity-Objects auszunutzen, hauptsächlich aus Angst, sie falsch oder schlecht darzustellen und deshalb teilen die meisten großen Netzwerke leider nur Notes.

Dabei könnte es so einfach sein!

@deadsuperhero schreibt auf seinem Blog, dass er eigentlich gerne Articles veröffentlichen will, aber (hauptsächlich) durch Mastodon zu Note gezwungen wird, wenn er sicher gehen will, dass der Text vollständig dargestellt wird.

Here’s the problem, though: the biggest player in the space, Mastodon, does a poor job of supporting Article. Instead, every post Mastodon uses is instead a Note. From a semantic point of view, it might not seem like there’s a lot of difference between the two: both are effectively texts posts that can contain some formatting markup, both can hold an arbitrary amount of characters, and both can effectively be used to represent a full article.

A Content-Fallback Mechanism for the Fediverse

Ironischerweise zeigt Mastodon eine föderierte Note vollständig an, auch wenn der Text weit über die eigentlich erlaubten 500 Zeichen hinaus geht, bei einem Article wird statt dessen aber nur die kurze summary benutzt.

Seine Idee: Ein Content-Fallback Mechanismus!

Das heißt jede Aktivität, egal von welchem Typ, liefert zusätzlich zu dem spezifischen Objekt, eine standardisierte Note (content-fallback):
{ "@context":[ "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", { "Hashtag":"as:Hashtag" } ], "id":"https://wedistribute.org/2024/04/iftas-dsa-guide/", "type":"Article", "content-fallback": { "content":"IFTAS, the dedicated Trust & Safety organization ...", "mediaType":"text/plain", "summary":"", "tag":[{ "href":"https://wedistribute.org/tags/fediverse", "name":"#fediverse", "type":"Hashtag" }], "type":"Note", "updated":"2024-04-11T20:55:29Z" }}Code-Sprache: JSON / JSON mit Kommentaren (json)
Ich verstehe das Problem und finde die Idee generell nicht schlecht, aber eigentlich bietet ActivityPub alles Nötige schon von Haus aus! ActivityPub oder besser ActivityStreams ist so aufgebaut, dass alle Objekte von einem Art Base-Object abgeleitet werden. Das heißt Article, Note, Event oder Place, haben ein gleiches Minimal-Set an Attributen:

• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-attachment]attachment[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-attributedto]attributedTo[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-audience]audience[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-content]content[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-context]context[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-name]name[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-icon]icon[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-image]image[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-inreplyto]inReplyTo[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-published]published[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-replies]replies[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-summary]summary[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-tag]tag[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-updated]updated[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-url]url[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-to]to[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-bto]bto[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-cc]cc[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-bcc]bcc[/url]
• [url=https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#dfn-mediatype]mediaType[/url]
• …und mehr

Und auch wenn beispielsweise Place oder Event einige spezifische Eigenschaften haben, die nicht jede Plattform „kennt“ und „versteht“, sollte es immer möglich sein, die Beschreibung (description oder summary) und den Titel (name) anzuzeigen.

Das Prinzip ist ähnlich wie, wenn nicht sogar inspiriert durch, schema.org/Thing. Auch hier basieren alle Objekte letztendlich auf einem Thing und trotz der wesentlich größeren Anzahl1 an Objekten und Attributen, können Suchmaschinen sich immer sicher sein, dass es zumindest einen name, eine description und eine url zum Anzeigen gibt.

Bevor wir über also über ein `content-fallback` nachdenken, sollten wir (meiner Meinung nach) erst einmal dafür sorgen, dass die vorhanden Möglichkeiten richtig genutzt werden.

1. The vocabulary currently consists of 806 Types, 1474 Properties 14 Datatypes, 90 Enumerations and 480 Enumeration members. – https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html ↩︎

So.... apparently Threads is asking users after 30 days if they want to keep Fediverse on.

I hope this is simply an analytics thing that they're tracking to see how many users keep it on and not some sort of "hey...nudge nudge....you might wanna turn that off...." kinda thing....

I still have my doubts about Threads federation even though I am more positive about it than others. I really hope they don't make me defederate. That will make me sad.

Update here: https://social.beaware.live/@BeAware/112312313160804986 🤦‍♂️🤬

#ActivityPub #Fedi #Fediverse #Threads #Meta #Mastodon

BeAware :veriweed:

2024-04-22 01:38:15

And here it is, the dark pattern at work....this threads integration is starting to go badly already....🤦‍♂️🙄

edit: and here's a threads engineer purposefully misconstruing the definition of dark patterns in a reply to me. https://social.beaware.live/@beaware.live@threads.net/112312317899201996 🤬

#Fedi #Fediverse #Threads #EEE #Meta #ActivityPub

BeAware (@beaware.live) on Threads

There it is...the dark pattern at work already....yep. this Fediverse integration is losing me🤦‍♂️this is how you lose trust guys....this is how you get blocked by 80% of Fedi, even if you have good intentions because this is shady as hell...

^Threads