4 ms·

I know more about this than most, but I’m still confused about how I’m supposed to deal with federated social media. I have a Threads account. I have a Mastodon

I know more about this than most, but I’m still confused about how I’m supposed to deal with federated social media. I have a Threads account. I have a Mastodon account. Then Threads added federation. What am I supposed to do with each account? They have different posting histories, they can’t be merged, but if I post the same thing to both of them, I’ll be repeating myself. Am I supposed to discontinue using one of them? If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post. It’s a mess.

righthand 1y ago
Really though is this a real world issue? Tombstone one and use the other. No reason to quit just because you don’t have perfect agency. Post both if you want, people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.
- JimDabell 1y ago
  > Tombstone one and use the other. Like I said: > If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post. > people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account. When people post the same thing to Facebook and Twitter, those posts don’t end up in the same feed. They do with federation and Threads / Mastodon.
  - em-bee 1y ago
    well, the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. and therefore if that is a concern you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. federation only works if everyone that you want to reach is in it.
    - JimDabell 1y ago
      > the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. It is federated for the people that want it. It’s a setting. > you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. But it’s federated for some people and not for others, so there isn’t a single behaviour I can take that consistently works.
      - jedahan 1y ago
        I am having trouble imagining the failure mode you are trying to avoid. It sounds like threads implementation of federation is broken. What effects does toggling that federation setting on or off do? Like if someone is following “duplicate” accounts of yours and therefore would see double posts, that person can unfollow one. Still double work for you that kind of sucks. Scuttlebutt had some work done on publicly declaring two identities as the same, I wonder what that would look like for posts. Like a post-id or simple equality comparison or hash could work server side or client side.
  - righthand 1y ago
    Right so your quibble is that part of your audience is not portable, not that federation makes posting harder. You either maintain a centralized service account or you don’t. That hasn’t changed with Meta services. It is Threads that doesn’t allow for portability. Further a tombstone would point users to the new account if they choose to continue following you. This can be done in a post and your bio. How bad is it that your two accounts end up in the same feed? By your own admission Threads is a different audience.
  - bee_rider 1y ago
    So, is the problem that you have accounts on both networks. You would be OK with just posting to both accounts, but for people who have the federation toggle on, they’ll get a duplicate view of your posts? That actually does seem annoying. You probably can’t do anything about it, but it seems like it would be extremely easy to fix on the platforms’ sides. Since you are intentionally trying not to have people get dupes of your posts, they could just add the ability to tag a post with some identifier, then not show posts that have the same identifier, and rely on you tag your posts appropriately (and an obvious feature would be to automate that tagging and include it in the various “share to <other platform>” buttons).
    - righthand 1y ago
      If I’m interested in following you why would I subscribe to both your Threads and Mastodon account?
      - bee_rider 1y ago
        I don’t know. Maybe they post different types of content on each network, but there’s some content that they post to both.
  - ethbr1 1y ago
    It'd be nice to have an HTTP 301-equivalent forwarding option + verify control via hashing. E.g. one could make a special post on the "continuing" feed, then tag the "killed" feed with 301+hash for auto-redirects (and/or dedupe)
aorloff 1y ago
One of these gives you ultimate control (mastodon / AT) if you want it (you can host and own the domain) or the ability to ride along with your choice of admin. The others do not give you any choice you buy the service from them and accept their terms (and presumably, virality, which you came for) Those are the trade offs
- JimDabell 1y ago
  None of that addressed any of the issues I have.
al_borland 1y ago
This is why centralized social media took off. It is easy to understand and use. Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing. I know people like to compare it with email, but with email I’m sending from server A to server B, I’m not sending from server A to hundreds of other servers and seeing that it doesn’t always make it everywhere. And if I edit or delete a post, maybe those changes will propagate out, but maybe not. Conceptually it’s hard, but even as a user who doesn’t care as long as the magic works… the magic doesn’t work all that well. So where does that leave decentralized social media? Bring back blogs + rss as the norm. It makes sense, it works, the user is in control, and it never feels like it is trying to substitute for human connection.
- JimDabell 1y ago
  > I know people like to compare it with email There is another, closer comparison to be made: Google Plus. With Google Plus, I suddenly had multiple social media accounts on Google Plus – I had the Google Plus profile associated with my personal Google account, the Google Plus profile associated with the place I worked, and the Google Plus profile associated with my freelance business. And to make it worse, it didn’t roll out all at once, so I added people I hung out with and worked with on my personal account, then had to re-do it again when my work account happened. And people were randomly adding me on whichever one they found first. I don’t think Google Plus got this right at all, and it feels like federation is making a lot of the similar mistakes to Google Plus.
  - specialist 1y ago
    IMHO: profiles (personas, aliases, alts) are orthogonal to federation. I once thought personas were critically important. Something like Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). But 1) I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to prevent deanonymonization and 2) USA govt didn't protect our privacy, so there is no market for a privacy preserving stack.
  - pjc50 1y ago
    Keeping the accounts separate seems like an extremely mandatory feature to me. If I had multiple Google accounts I would absolutely not want any information leakage from one to the other.
MithrilTuxedo 1y ago
Think of them like different social groups.
omoikane 1y ago
One thing I like about Mastodon and Bluesky (and Twitter before 2023) is that most of it can be read without having an account, so users can ignore all federation features and just treat them like old school websites. The fact that they have different implementation details that is not so important to me, though personally I replicate all my posts for readers who prefer one place over another.
AuthAuth 1y ago
Threads didnt even up properly federating. Its only 1 way, so from Mastodon you can follow people on threads if your instance hasnt blocked it (it probably has) and from threads you cant follow anything in the fediverse. You also need to enable a setting ot make your account followable.
3RTB297 1y ago
I use Lemmy, and while federated social media might seem like this up front, a good comparison is dorms and classes at a large university. Every dorm/housing and school program has its own vibe and attitude. Your student ID gets you in to all of them, but you live in one dorm building in particular, let's call it Jones Tower. There might be some seeming overlap between buildings - maybe Dinkley Hall and the Rogers Building both have Engineering floors, but they're not the same at all. You can cross-list classes between the geology department and theater school and gerontology, that's cool. You can have friends that live in Dinkey Hall and the Blake Apartments, and they can all go anywhere they want. Is it a mess? Not really. Is it as plain and one-size-fits-all as single-story high school like Facebook? Not at all. Does it take time to understand how to sign up for a cross-listed class? Sure. To some it's worth it to be there, and plenty drop out because it's not for them, and that's fine. IMO, the benefit is the barrier to entry. It's not for everyone and doesn't need to be. Threads added federation, but only Mastodon servers are connected, and not all of them - this is like Threads is the private medical school across town that lets grad school students from the Fediverse Uni come over for specific classes.
zft 1y ago
Interop, standards and nature of ATproto brings ability to build different applications. for example you can easily build analytics on top of ATproto, like this one https://www.graphtracks.com/stats/bluesky/graph/rudyfraser.com/last-day https://www.graphtracks.com/stats/bluesky/graph/rudyfraser.c...
nottorp 1y ago
How is that different from posting the same thing on Facebook and Twitter?

righthand 1y ago

Really though is this a real world issue? Tombstone one and use the other. No reason to quit just because you don’t have perfect agency. Post both if you want, people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account.

JimDabell 1y ago
> Tombstone one and use the other. Like I said: > If I do that, then the people who don’t see the federated content (e.g. Threads users with federation disabled) will stop seeing what I post. > people post on Facebook and Twitter and don’t quit because someone has a similar schtick/account name/or just one account. When people post the same thing to Facebook and Twitter, those posts don’t end up in the same feed. They do with federation and Threads / Mastodon.
- em-bee 1y ago
  well, the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. and therefore if that is a concern you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. federation only works if everyone that you want to reach is in it.
  - JimDabell 1y ago
    > the problem here obviously is that threads is not fully federated. It is federated for the people that want it. It’s a setting. > you need to treat your thread account as not federated too. But it’s federated for some people and not for others, so there isn’t a single behaviour I can take that consistently works.
    - jedahan 1y ago
      I am having trouble imagining the failure mode you are trying to avoid. It sounds like threads implementation of federation is broken. What effects does toggling that federation setting on or off do? Like if someone is following “duplicate” accounts of yours and therefore would see double posts, that person can unfollow one. Still double work for you that kind of sucks. Scuttlebutt had some work done on publicly declaring two identities as the same, I wonder what that would look like for posts. Like a post-id or simple equality comparison or hash could work server side or client side.
- righthand 1y ago
  Right so your quibble is that part of your audience is not portable, not that federation makes posting harder. You either maintain a centralized service account or you don’t. That hasn’t changed with Meta services. It is Threads that doesn’t allow for portability. Further a tombstone would point users to the new account if they choose to continue following you. This can be done in a post and your bio. How bad is it that your two accounts end up in the same feed? By your own admission Threads is a different audience.
- bee_rider 1y ago
  So, is the problem that you have accounts on both networks. You would be OK with just posting to both accounts, but for people who have the federation toggle on, they’ll get a duplicate view of your posts? That actually does seem annoying. You probably can’t do anything about it, but it seems like it would be extremely easy to fix on the platforms’ sides. Since you are intentionally trying not to have people get dupes of your posts, they could just add the ability to tag a post with some identifier, then not show posts that have the same identifier, and rely on you tag your posts appropriately (and an obvious feature would be to automate that tagging and include it in the various “share to <other platform>” buttons).
  - righthand 1y ago
    If I’m interested in following you why would I subscribe to both your Threads and Mastodon account?
    - bee_rider 1y ago
      I don’t know. Maybe they post different types of content on each network, but there’s some content that they post to both.
- ethbr1 1y ago
  It'd be nice to have an HTTP 301-equivalent forwarding option + verify control via hashing. E.g. one could make a special post on the "continuing" feed, then tag the "killed" feed with 301+hash for auto-redirects (and/or dedupe)

aorloff 1y ago

One of these gives you ultimate control (mastodon / AT) if you want it (you can host and own the domain) or the ability to ride along with your choice of admin. The others do not give you any choice you buy the service from them and accept their terms (and presumably, virality, which you came for) Those are the trade offs

JimDabell 1y ago
None of that addressed any of the issues I have.

al_borland 1y ago

This is why centralized social media took off. It is easy to understand and use. Even within Mastodon it’s a mess with all the various servers. It’s too confusing. I know people like to compare it with email, but with email I’m sending from server A to server B, I’m not sending from server A to hundreds of other servers and seeing that it doesn’t always make it everywhere. And if I edit or delete a post, maybe those changes will propagate out, but maybe not. Conceptually it’s hard, but even as a user who doesn’t care as long as the magic works… the magic doesn’t work all that well. So where does that leave decentralized social media? Bring back blogs + rss as the norm. It makes sense, it works, the user is in control, and it never feels like it is trying to substitute for human connection.

JimDabell 1y ago
> I know people like to compare it with email There is another, closer comparison to be made: Google Plus. With Google Plus, I suddenly had multiple social media accounts on Google Plus – I had the Google Plus profile associated with my personal Google account, the Google Plus profile associated with the place I worked, and the Google Plus profile associated with my freelance business. And to make it worse, it didn’t roll out all at once, so I added people I hung out with and worked with on my personal account, then had to re-do it again when my work account happened. And people were randomly adding me on whichever one they found first. I don’t think Google Plus got this right at all, and it feels like federation is making a lot of the similar mistakes to Google Plus.
- specialist 1y ago
  IMHO: profiles (personas, aliases, alts) are orthogonal to federation. I once thought personas were critically important. Something like Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P). But 1) I wasn't smart enough to figure out how to prevent deanonymonization and 2) USA govt didn't protect our privacy, so there is no market for a privacy preserving stack.
- pjc50 1y ago
  Keeping the accounts separate seems like an extremely mandatory feature to me. If I had multiple Google accounts I would absolutely not want any information leakage from one to the other.

MithrilTuxedo 1y ago

Think of them like different social groups.

omoikane 1y ago

One thing I like about Mastodon and Bluesky (and Twitter before 2023) is that most of it can be read without having an account, so users can ignore all federation features and just treat them like old school websites. The fact that they have different implementation details that is not so important to me, though personally I replicate all my posts for readers who prefer one place over another.

AuthAuth 1y ago

Threads didnt even up properly federating. Its only 1 way, so from Mastodon you can follow people on threads if your instance hasnt blocked it (it probably has) and from threads you cant follow anything in the fediverse. You also need to enable a setting ot make your account followable.

3RTB297 1y ago

I use Lemmy, and while federated social media might seem like this up front, a good comparison is dorms and classes at a large university. Every dorm/housing and school program has its own vibe and attitude. Your student ID gets you in to all of them, but you live in one dorm building in particular, let's call it Jones Tower. There might be some seeming overlap between buildings - maybe Dinkley Hall and the Rogers Building both have Engineering floors, but they're not the same at all. You can cross-list classes between the geology department and theater school and gerontology, that's cool. You can have friends that live in Dinkey Hall and the Blake Apartments, and they can all go anywhere they want. Is it a mess? Not really. Is it as plain and one-size-fits-all as single-story high school like Facebook? Not at all. Does it take time to understand how to sign up for a cross-listed class? Sure. To some it's worth it to be there, and plenty drop out because it's not for them, and that's fine. IMO, the benefit is the barrier to entry. It's not for everyone and doesn't need to be. Threads added federation, but only Mastodon servers are connected, and not all of them - this is like Threads is the private medical school across town that lets grad school students from the Fediverse Uni come over for specific classes.

zft 1y ago

Interop, standards and nature of ATproto brings ability to build different applications. for example you can easily build analytics on top of ATproto, like this one https://www.graphtracks.com/stats/bluesky/graph/rudyfraser.com/last-day https://www.graphtracks.com/stats/bluesky/graph/rudyfraser.c...

nottorp 1y ago

How is that different from posting the same thing on Facebook and Twitter?