For anyone wondering if Threads and Facebook at large will be a fine neighbor in the space and compatible with other apps/services in the fediverse: they’re already automatically hiding comments that mention Pixelfed https://mastodon.social/@dansup/112126250737482807
@Minotaur @henfredemars @technology You are using an account on lemm.ee to reply to someone commenting from an account on infosec.pub in a community hosted on lemmy.world.
Those are all running Lemmy software, but I am replying from an account on social.goodanser.com, which is running Mastodon software.
That’s federation. We’re all using different service providers, sometimes even different software, but we can talk to each other because they speak the same protocol, called ActivityPub. Threads.net has announced plans to support ActivityPub and conducted some limited trials, which they’re in the process of expanding. They claim they intend to support it fully, but only for users who opt in to it.
Servers can block, or “defederate from” other servers, and many have chosen to preemptively defederate from Threads.
Very interesting. Appreciate the response. Didn’t know big companies like meta had any interest in the whole “federation” gig, seeing that it seems a little “opposed” to the kind of big revenue that supports tech companies like that
But it actually isn’t, because the largest driver of growth for platforms like facebook & instagram is the already present userbase.
That userbase will always be there if the programs are all federated together, so creating a new platform is now just making a better site versus that and bringing in the userbase.
And now I’m commenting from a lemmy.world account because Lemmy from Mastodon has some rough edges like the need to tag the community in my comment above to ensure it actually reaches the lemmy.world server.
Tumblr and Flickr are also talking about ActivityPub support, but it’s not clear if or when that will actually happen. It would make more sense to me for those services since they’re fairly small and it’s a way to substantially increase the possible audience. It’s not clear what Meta’s motivations are here, though a motivation some have proposed is that they’re trying to get in front of potential regulation. The EU Digital Markets Act, for example requires some services to interoperate with competitors, and having one of its new products join an established standard protocol is a way to say “you don’t need to regulate us, we already do the thing”.
I don’t think their blocking of comments mentioning Pixelfed is intentional. Pixelfed is not popular enough for Meta to care about as a competitor, and blocking mentions of competitors has never been among their tactics.
Appreciate this response, it seems to make a lot of sense to me.
I think people on sites like Lemmy and similar can kind of uhh… overestimate how much anyone outside of a very niche crowd care about the whole “federalization” movement, and yeah it seems unlikely to me that Threads is going out of its way to shadowban a (comparatively) niche competitor like Pixelfed
I’m about 99% sure Threads uses automated spam/abuse filtering based on uncommon words present in posts that have recently been flagged as abusive. Somebody, perhaps several somebodies probably posted “follow my porn account on Pixelfed” or similar that Threads doesn’t like. I’d use something like that if I was making a huge social media thing because you can’t not at that scale.
Youtube was blocking comments mentioning Fediverse and ActivityPub 2 years ago way before all the exposure the Fediverse got last year. Facebook was blocking links to mastodon instances also before all that. There is absolutely no way a very specific word such as Pixelfed would be blocked “accidentally”, how do you propose such accidental block would even be possible? Oops, intern smashed his butt against a keyboard and set a filter that happened to catch Pixelfed by accident? Come on.