3 ms·
Once upon a time you could follow someone's public Facebook posts from any RSS reader you liked, whether or not you had an account. Now the only way to follow s
by egypturnash 3y ago
Once upon a time you could follow someone's public Facebook posts from any RSS reader you liked, whether or not you had an account. Now the only way to follow someone's Facebook posts is to have an account there. And Facebook will probably only show you a small fraction of the posts by the people you actually follow, sorted by what Meta thinks is most likely to make Meta money.
If you trust Meta to not follow a similar playbook with Threads, you are much more optimistic than I am.
I run a small Mastodon instance, and have preemptively defederated from Threads because I do not want Meta to suck in my posts for free and use them as something to spread apart Meta ad views. I've informed my users of this and so far everyone with a reply has praised this decision. They have made choices.
In fact lately there have been waves of spam from the big open-registration instances. I and a lot of other small instance admins I know have responded by limiting our federation with these instances. This creates a slightly worse experience for our users, in that they're likely to stop seeing media from big-instance accounts they follow. And it creates choice - do they talk to their friends on the big instances and say "hey can I persuade you to move to an instance that isn't a spam gateway?" Does the friend say "yes" and acquire an invitation to a closed-registration instance that's well-federated to their friend network? Eventually we end up with multiple networks all on ActivityPub that have very few connections. And this is fine. Because people can also do things like choose to have multiple accounts on these multiple networks.
- iteratethis 3y agoI remember the RSS times. But let's be honest. Even then it was only tech enthusiasts using an RSS reader. Probably the same people now experimenting with the Fediverse. Do I trust Meta regarding federation? No. But I'm thinking it's an afterthought for them. The Fediverse isn't a threat to them at all, just like RSS never was. I totally understand that some instances have strong opinions about this and self-isolate to a degree. And that will cement what Mastodon is: a set of small for-purpose communities. It will not compete with the scale of Big Tech and maybe it shouldn't. Mastodon is to stay in their marginal role, a niche network. For sure exactly those strong-willed instances will agree to that. I'm fine with that as well. I'm just pointing out that an anti-growth mindset produces a small network.
- webmaven 3y agoIt wasn't just "tech enthusiasts", there were a couple of other large and active groups. One was centered on podcasts as a medium (both listeners and creators), and another can be loosely characterized as "information junkies" (such as journalists and obsessive news consumers).
- PhasmaFelis 3y ago> I remember the RSS times. But let's be honest. Even then it was only tech enthusiasts using an RSS reader. RSS is still the best way to follow webcomics.
- threeseed 3y agoYou can't blame Meta for shutting down RSS given how many companies e.g. Cambridge Analytica abused open data access features for nefarious purposes. It is still possible to access the data just via the official Graph API.
- iteratethis 3y agoOpen data is actually very interesting as it comes to ActivityPub. A naive implementations means any motivated actor can suck up the entire Fediverse, using it for AI, ad profile building.
- Andrew_nenakhov 3y agoOpen data like RSS is by design intended to be used by anyone for any purpose, yes, including analytics. If you aren't ok with that, what's next you want to move to some closed garden, websites?
- rchaud 3y ago> Once upon a time you could follow someone's public Facebook posts from any RSS reader you liked, whether or not you had an account ...and then Facebook introduced the algorithmic timeline, then one of the most hated feature changes. They also killed off any third party apps that dared to give you the FB experience you were used to. Embrace, extend extinguish. Companies will give you everything when they don't care about making money.
- itsmartapuntocm 3y agoAfter all this time I think Facebook still you gives the option to send you PGP encrypted emails, which is pretty wild.
- james_pm 3y agoNope. Deprecated just a couple of weeks ago.
- itsmartapuntocm 3y agoDang. I loved that it was still there as a relic of when it wasn’t quite as mainstream.
- vitorgrs 3y ago> I do not want Meta to suck in my posts for free and use them as something to spread apart Meta ad views. Unless your profile is private, they don't need Threads to federate to have access to your profile... Actually, with Reddit, Twitter and Meta APIs being closed, would be a very good idea for AI companies to get some data from Mastodon instances to train LLMs....