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

My friend Evan Henshaw-Plath wrote recently about some concerns with ActivityPub. I want to go over his concerns one by one and give some assessment of how accurate and important I think they are. Rabble’s words in italics; my responses in just normal text.

• User identities are tied to a server. This is only partially true; your user identity is tied to a domain, not a server. But most servers only handle one domain, and most people don’t move their domains between servers. We have a section on domain portability between servers on the ActivityPub Data Portability report.
  Using domains is also how much of the Internet works. Email addresses are tied to a domain; Web sites are tied to a domain. You can move the domain between different implementations transparently. It’s a really robust architecture that has stood the test of time for almost 50 years.
• Users can’t migrate between servers. Partially true. Rabble covers the essentials; you can move followers and not much else. It’s also possible to move your “stuff” between identities; that’s most of what our Data Portability task force is working on.
• On a single server, it is impossible to change your username! Somewhat true. ActivityPub identities are URLs like https://social.example/user/vtles1XgZkPUEulBsFmRX . That identity URL is immutable; you can’t change it. Some implementations include a username in that url, like https://other.example/user/evanp. With that kind of server software, it’s true, you can’t change the username.
  Also, we use a standard called Webfinger that maps an identity string like username@domain to an URL. You can read about it in the ActivityPub Webfinger report. Some servers use that string, instead of the ActivityPub ID, as the unique ID for a remote user. That’s discouraged, but if someone does that, changing your user ID will make you no longer findable for those other servers. I think as we stabilize our use of WebFinger, some of these usages are going to get better.
• Fediverse servers have total control over your account and data. True. This is the “federation” part of the fediverse. It’s how Web sites and email work. Don’t use a fediverse server without a good trust relationship with your server admin; ideally someone you have a business relationship with, or your employer, or your university. Same goes for email!
  It also means that if you control your own server, you have total control over your account and data. That’s a feature, not a bug.
  Another option is using a cooperative server, like cosocial.ca or social.coop. A cooperative is a legal structure in which members pay for and manage their own service. I think cooperatives are awesome.
• The fediverse is a network of fiefdoms, each server admin having total control over their users. This seems about the same as the previous statement, but OK. I think the key strength of the fediverse here is that we can have dozens of different models for server governance — coops, enterprises, city libraries, family servers, individual servers. That level of experimentation is a feature, not a bug. Governance is not baked into the protocol.
• Each kind of fediverse server is isolated. This one is just plain wrong. ActivityPub is based on an open data standard called Activity Streams 2.0 (AS2) which models social data. There is an extensive standard vocabulary that can represent Web content like text, images, video and audio, and the social graph, but also well-known social interactions like check-ins, events, and groups. More importantly, Activity Streams 2.0 is extensible, meaning you can add properties to existing types, or whole new types of objects or interactions. And every ActivityPub server is built to handle AS2.
  What is true is that we have had a lot of servers that only handle a subset of the AS2 vocabulary, and reject content they don’t know how to handle. This is mostly due to mimicking the siloed social networks; we’ve gotten used to thinking of different social networks for different kinds of content. I think this is changing, especially as new kinds of content hit the network. Developers are just learning how to effectively handle extension content with fallback representations. I look forward to this improving over time.
• The fediverse has no privacy; there is no system of end-to-end encrypted messaging. The first part is false; you can mark your posts as followers-only, or directed to a single person, or a group of people. Servers enforce this privacy. You can also mark that you don’t want your public posts to be indexable or your public account to be discoverable.
  However, the second part is true; we don’t have end-to-end encryption. So, if you send a private message to someone on another server, you message can be read by both your admin and their admin. It’s stored in the clear on both servers. This is also how email works, as well as most direct messages on commercial social networks. However, it’s something worth working on. I’ve sketched out an architecture for end-to-end encryption over ActivityPub, and I’ve got a proposal out to work on it for Summer of Protocols. I think it will be good to level this up!
• The fediverse has no system for micropayments. This is true. The fediverse is also first and foremost for social networking — connecting to friends, family, colleagues and neighbours. Most of these interactions are not mediated by payment; in fact, payment cheapens those interactions.
  However, there are other relationship types on the fediverse — supporting creators, journalists, or publishers. The main way to do this today is with paid subscriptions; for example, you can subscribe to evanplus@prodromou.pub to get access to premium content I publish. You have to send me US$5 out-of-band or I won’t approve the follow; that’s the state of play right now on the fediverse.
  I think in-band payments are kind of cool for this kind of work, as well as for marketplaces — buying and selling services or goods over the fediverse. I think the easiest structure is adding payment URLs like a PayPal account, or blockchain wallets like a Bitcoin Lightning address.
• Lastly, and most importantly for me, the culture of fediverse server admins and developers is vindictive. I don’t think this is the case; I love the culture of the fediverse, which is playful, conversational, and collaborative.

I think there are a plenty of good points in Rabble’s critique, but there’s one way that I think he’s extremely wrong. There is still a lot to do in the ActivityPub ecosystem, but we have the architecture and extension mechanisms to make them possible. It’s totally not required to go start a whole new social protocol to build those things in from scratch. In fact, it’s a real mistake; it’s far better to work from the existing standard and build on it. Open standards like ActivityPub have a legitimacy that ad hoc systems like Nostr can never have, and it’s the reason that there is so much interesting development going on in the ActivityPub world.

https://evanp.me/2024/04/14/responses-to-rabble-on-activitypub/

#activitypub

A nice article, also with a great explainer section on Phanpy.

An amusing note is that all the things the article lifts regarding handling conversations and posts being “in context”, and how that is so much more user-friendly than Mastodons single-flow default.

It is amusing as that is the functionality that Pleroma, and it’s bastard child Akkoma (which is what I use), has built-in for years, and one of my main reasons for using “not-Mastodon”.

When Pleroma/Akkoma does it most Mastodon-users call it “dated”, “complex” and “boring”. When another (Mastodon-client) service does it, it is called ground-breaking and amazing. Ah well.

But indeed, Phanpy also doing it is a great thing indeed, I use Phanpy myself, in particular on my phone, and it does it really nicely, along with having a multitude of other functionality.

https://www.augment.ink/threads-on-mastodon/

#ActivityPub #Fediverse #Akkoma #Pleroma #Phanpy #Mastodon #Threads

「The Efforts to Extend ActivityPub」
https://wedistribute.org/2024/03/extending-activitypub/

現状 ActivityPub には何が足りないか、今後どう標準化していく動きがあるか、といった記事。Fediverse Enhancement Proposals（FEPs）という文書群があるのか。

#Fediverse #ActivityPub