Yet people readily pay $99/year for apps all the time. I think the reason this isn’t an app is because the gate keepers don’t want competition. Looking at you Siri.
Do they really? I don't even pay that much for my entire O365 suite.
The most expensive app I pay for is Telegram Premium at 30$ per year. And that's really worth it for me for the translation otherwise I would have thought twice.
As a Mastodon/Fediverse user, I hope the rumors that this is based on ActivityPub are true. I'd love for there to be an easy-to-use interface for everyone that brings more people and content into the Fediverse.
If you want to leave Twitter cause it keeps breaking there's a few groups you might fall into:
a) you don't give a damn about openness or tech or any of that but just want something that works
b) your first priorities are "where the people are" and "it works" but federated and open protocols are a big bonus
c) you absolutely want to go somewhere more open instead of another centralized service
Group A is big, and generally folks not on HN. HN itself splits between groups B and C.
If you think group B is a fair bit bigger than group C, but want the open stuff to thrive in the long term, then an initially-"friendly" Meta controlled app can harm you by attracting a big part of the people in group B and then slowly degrading the experience for folks using open clients over time until finally cutting it off. Most of group B won't migrate again at that point as long as they don't fuck up the experience completely.
Whereas if the Meta version wasn't "friendly" at first, much more of that group B might move straight to open things, and then stay there, creating a larger long-term userbase.
It's a way to keep people from fully jumping ship to open solutions by offering short-term openness that will dwindle over time.
If there are more Threads users than non-Threads users then non-Threads instance admins have to choose between adapt or risk emigration. EEE is a consolidation tactic after all.
Many of the people on Mastodon today are perfectly happy without Meta users on it, myself included. If they try to hard-fork, I'm fairly certain the self-hosters would just walk away and let the links/outgoing support break on Meta's app. They need peering networks more than peering networks need them.
They don't have a diverse content-base yet. The Fediverse "shall provide it" to them if it goes according to their plans. Once this deed is done, the Fediverse is no longer valuable to them.
The EU believes social networks and messaging apps should all connect to each other. This is a bad idea (it makes spam filtering impossible) but nevertheless it's in the DMA.
Mastodon admins might find that law applies to them too.
I'd wager Mastodon is ready for this. Abhorrent/illegal/spamming/offensive/offending instances can be defederated from to remove liability at a server-level, and users can self-moderate with "block instance" functionality from their client. Both sides are sufficiently equipped to filter their respective feeds.
It's the realm of pure fantasy to envision a world where the EU bans an original community project to force everyone into a Meta-designed fork. Mastodon users should be safe as long as they're free to run their own server and client software.
That's fine. Blocking their entire website from ever hitting your feed takes 2 clicks.
My point is that this really doesn't matter. If they use ActivityPub as-written, both clients and servers can stop Meta content from reaching their feed. If you just find Threads content annoying, you long-press the post and tap "Block Instance". If you're a site admin and have been given a legitimate reason to block Meta for API abuse (eg. poorly-moderated content, spam, advertisement) then you can exercise your defederation power and be within your right.
Meta has money to pay app developers to develop a good app.
Most ActivityPub services have taken ages to get decent apps and even now Mastodon has some obvious problems. Opening someone else's profile if nobody on your server follows them shows you a barren timeline with no history and there's still no way to tell Mastodon "go fetch toots from this user's outbox".
Meta has lots of money, which the Fediverse does not and needs money to stay online. This is why admins of very large instances signed NDA with Meta to federate with them.
This will not benefit Mastodon/Fediverse, but it will benefit Meta because of the already available content. It's basically solving their chicken-or-egg problem for them.
I'm not at all sure this will be good for the Fediverse. I already see Meta "improving" upon ActivityPub in incompatible ways, urging people to just use their app (potential quote: "you can see all of the Fediverse anyways") and in the long run (when their own "instance" is big enough) will pull the plug again and be on its own.
Free Software isn't about picking and choosing who gets to run your program or interact with your protocol. Federation is, but the concept of Meta using ActivityPub has nothing inherently wrong with it.
If Meta has the gall to rug-pull the entire Fediverse, things will just return to the same status quo they are today. Multiple content silos with thousands of freely-federating alternative platforms. As a Mastodon user I can't say I'm very scared of it, such a decision would hurt Meta more than it helps them.
> Free Software isn't about picking and choosing who gets to run your program or interact with your protocol. Federation is, but the concept of Meta using ActivityPub has nothing inherently wrong with it.
Meta can ActivityPub themselves all day long, as far as I'm concerned. If I were a server operator, I wouldn't let them anywhere NEAR my users though, so no federation with them.
> If Meta has the gall to rug-pull the entire Fediverse, things will just return to the same status quo they are today.
This is very optimistic. EEE in the past didn't turn out that way. I can imagine the Fediverse being an empty husk with no (significant) life left, but that's just my fears.
Many people already imagine the Fediverse being an empty husk with no significant life left. I'm using the platform today, and I'm perfectly happy.
The EEE attempts on a major open platform haven't even reached step 3, arguably. ActiveX, XServe, Flash and Silverlight all failed spectacularly at their goal of co-opting and extinguishing the concept of the internet. Considering how Meta has no meaningful leverage over the Fediverse community, I think your fears are unwarranted. Best case scenario, Meta plays by the rules and federates well-regulated content into everyone's feeds like Twitter with less extremism. Worst-case scenario, Meta goes crazy and takes all the normies with them to their closed Threads landscape, returning things to how they are now (dense with nerds and misfits). I don't think Meta enthusiasts or current Fediverse denizens would care either way.
Off topic, but wasn’t Xserve just Apple’s rack mount system running Mac OS X Server? How was it trying to co-opt and extinguish the internet? (Not snarking, genuinely curious)
There is a pact to instantly defederate, many have already preemptively blocked their domains.
I deleted my account this morning, with a backup natch - nice thing about Mastodon, I can start up exactly where I left off, including whatever followers come over to the non-Meta side of the schism.
People act like the schism Fedi being small is a bad thing, I don't think we're supposed to interact with the entire planet as individuals. We apes do not have the capacity to handle it.
The limit of people we can effectively interact with in a group setting is around 150. This is a limit of our brain, probably the neocortex, because bigger neocortexes lead to bigger group sizes in primates.
Most big servers seem to be in a pact to defederate from Facebook before it even goes online.
I also remember the rumours stating that the Federation part was exclusively targeting large Mastodon servers, and also mostly unidirectional (from Mastodon to Threads).
I don't think the federation support will be all that great from what I've heard. But who knows, maybe it'll bring the Fediverse to the mainstream.
So for the record, the author of the "pact" has been publishing blatant fiction under the guises of "unverified rumors" and nearly everything you said here falls into that. All of it has been confirmed false by either Meta or representatives of the fediverse who met with Meta.
Meta isn't making any special deals with large servers and basically no large servers have signed the pact. Most of the pact signatories are single user servers or similar, there's a handful of small to medium sized ones, and even those who are defederating Meta will not defederate the servers that do federate with Meta.
Oh, absolutely. Even amongst all of the large servers, which expect to allow federation with Threads, none of them intend to give Meta special treatment. If they can't keep their house in order, they will end up getting defederated.
That being said, the big question will be how open Threads is to the rest of the fediverse. It likely won't include the global federated feed, so the question will be how much Threads users end up interacting with the average Mastodon user. It might end up being we only see Threads users when they either manually know a user they want to follow, or Meta promotes content from folks like George Takei into Threads and we see trash comments on that.
That doesn't seem to be true. There are a lot of instances that have signed the 'pact' to defederate Threads right away, but those tend to be mostly small instances.
Looking at the largest 30 or so instances by users most of them seem to have a 'wait and see' approach, which seems much more reasonable to me.
What's great is I can easily swap to an instance that is federating!
Unidirectional federation sounds like a nightmare on the UX side, so if that's the case I imagine it'd be Threads to Mastodon, enabling you to follow (but not interact) with Threads users.
> What's great is I can easily swap to an instance that is federating!
Define swap. I'm hearing instances which federate with FB will be defederated as well. If instances need to be federated to "swap", it likely won't be easy.
You should look into the story of XMPP and how it got killed by Google. The situation is pretty much identical to what Facebook is doing here, and the ending will likely be the same: once Meta gets enough users, they'll subtly break federation with ActivityPub, and everyone will just move to Threads because that's where all the content is. So, in the end, we end up with just another centralized app owned by a tech giant.
From a user on a small mastodon instance, no thank you. Admins of the smaller, more colorful, and technical instances are already getting ready to actively block and defederate as necessary. We don't want or need Meta bringing their digital typhoid to the fediverse.
One reason I haven't started Mastodon is that I don't want my experience to be ruled by self-righteous egotistical reddit mods. It's better for users when the admins are professional and checked out.
If only you were so lucky, Mastodon admins are way worse.
Not only might they mod at will in the way reddit mods do, Mastodon admins take it several steps further by bothering other instance mods about their moderation. And then yet another step: whom they federate with. They'll form little secret discord channels where they gather and form cancellation pacts on entire instances, based on a whim.
Is this not one of the primary advantages of federation and decentralized networks though? I think that there's a strong argument to be made that Everything networks have a deleterious effect on the collective human psyche because we're simply not designed to contemplate or accommodate so many radically different worldviews at once. Instead of creating societies with a strong emphasis on individual rights we exist in a pressure cooker of mental illness and anger amplified by algorithms that is pushing is closer and closer toward regulating one another out of existence.
Freedom of association is one of the most fundamental freedoms we have and democratic, free market societies can only flourish as long as we all agree to leave one another alone. You or I may not fully agree on the utility of say gay marriage or vaccines or religion or any number of cultural differences, but neither of us should be compelled to seriously entertain or fundamentally alter our way of being and thinking to please the other. This is how the old internet worked, the only reason we feel that it's impossible now is because we've been made to believe in totalizing systems of power that flatten and threaten to erase (by legal mandate or otherwise) different subcultures.
I use WinMerge[1] a lot, and it's always impressed me how it immediately opens to a useable state. So it's absolutely still possible to write Windows software that can open instantly. I think the biggest issue, which multiple other comments have identified, is that people just don't care. Apps open fast enough these days, and no one is pushing back on developers to improve their app's startup performance.
Most hi-res audio is being sold as digital downloads. I don't think there's a currently-sold physical medium that contains digital data that's higher quality than a CD.
The iPod nano 7th generation uses the same file structure as other iPods, but appears to use a database checksum that hasn't been reverse engineered yet. Given that the 7th generation nano has Bluetooth, I hope it's a more attractive target for exploits and reverse engineering. I agree that it's a lovely form factor!
I'd be 100% down to help, if you do -- my 7th gen iPod Nano is the best MP3 player I've ever owned, the Bluetooth compatibility alone made it fantastic, and I'd love to get some new lease on life with it (or even just tinker with it. Being able to not be dependent on iTunes alone would be awesome)
That is a very sensible proactive move on the part of the team, they must have both been concerned about the future viability of third party twitter clients, and the potential of Mastodon as a new market. From what I've heard the Mastodon client they are building is very good, it's in closed beta right now.
I love this idea! I do think the method of picking results needs a bit of tweaking. I tried the most basic case, charging a laptop with a C-to-C cable, and it suggested two Thunderbolt cables and a 5 Gbps cable, all of which are overkill (and less than ideal given their length limitations).
But isn't that part of why the standard is so terrible? Isn't the only way to get maximum power delivery over a Thunderbolt cable? You can probably charge a laptop over a standard cheap USB-C cable..but you might not depending on how many watts your laptop wants.
