this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
507 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

59179 readers
2207 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] KazuyaDarklight@lemmy.world 88 points 1 year ago (13 children)

I'm still on the fence about that being a good thing. I'm kind of looking forward to being able to see Twitter style content from major companies but without ads via my Mastodon account.

[–] icydefiance@kbin.social 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why do you think a large corporation would just share their content to people who aren't viewing their ads?

They're not just being generous. Corporations are not benevolent. So what are they expecting to get from it?

Here's the answer: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

[–] dice@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

companies want to reach users, so they join Threads.

meta wants to federate Threads because it allows them to claim that they are not a “gatekeeper” under the EU’s new social media law and therefore not have legal responsibility for the content hosted by it.

a side effect of this is that I can view content posted by companies on Threads via a federated instance.

This is not necessarily the corp’s intention or them being generous. it is just a direct result of Meta using the fediverse as a loophole to get around an EU law and how ActivityPup functions.

I don’t actually think that this is an example of EEE because the Fediverse is not more popular than typical social media experiences, nor does it desire to become more popular or take over things like Facebook or Twitter. It simply wants to be a smaller alternative. I really think if it weren’t for the EU, meta would not be federating Threads.

[–] icydefiance@kbin.social 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

EEE wouldn't work on something that is popular. The whole point is to destroy it before it becomes popular. Furthermore, corporations aren't okay with smaller alternatives existing at all. Their goal is to have a monopoly. Finally, Mastodon's growth has been really impressive for the last couple years, so I'm certain that other social media companies are looking for ways to shut them down.

The "gatekeeper" theory has some merit too, but not in that way. You can find the definition of a "gatekeeper" on the European Commission's website and I don't see how federation would affect it at all. That said, gatekeepers are required to "allow end users to install third party apps or app stores that use or interoperate with the operating system of the gatekeeper", and federation would meet that criteria.

Still, we already saw Twitter and Reddit move to paid APIs, and apparently that doesn't violate the DMA, so it's hard to believe that Meta would use a more open protocol without some other motivation.

[–] nurple@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Finally, Mastodon's growth has been really impressive for the last couple years, so I'm certain that other social media companies are looking for ways to shut them down.

Even with its impressive growth Mastodon is a drop in the bucket and I highly doubt any of the major players view it as a significant threat or competitor.

[–] RemembertheApollo@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago

It’s a lot cheaper to consume the competition before it’s a threat.

load more comments (11 replies)