Lmao, called it
Honestly surprised there are no ads yet. I thought that was the whole point of the website…
You don’t raise temperature while the frog is in the pond.
They have to build social inertia first. This is something Facebook figured out a long time ago and is well-documented. They were begging for money from investors to keep the site running and Zuck refused to run ads because the site was still growing like crazy.
It might be years yet before they start running ads but rest assured they will eventually.
They need to make it nice first, to reel people in. Once they are in and invested, that’s when ads start.
Yep. that’s the classic shitty business model
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Make a site that’s attractive to use for a lot of people
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Once you have enough people, lock in the users with network effect, walled garden, etc
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Use the users to draw in businesses
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Lock in the businesses and squeeze them for profit.
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Squeeze users and businesses for money, abandon any maintenance and improvement on the site except for monetization.
It’s the 3 D’s.
- Develop the product
- Draw people in
- Dump a nice steamy log on the whole thing
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Hey, I’ve seen that one!
Well that sounds enshitty.
wait till you see the -ification.
that’s when they start filtering out the genuine content and show you mostly promoted stuff
Don’t worry, Threads Pro will have you covered for an ad reduction for 3.99/mo.! And Threads Pro Plus for 5.99/mo. will get rid of them all by 2030!
Your prices are optimistically low. They’ll probably be double that and lock features behind the more expensive plan.
Couldn’t I just block whatever account throws in advertising?
I don’t get why anyone even uses it. There are other better options that aren’t run by Facebook.
It’s an awareness thing. Everyone uses it because everyone else uses it, because it’s the main one people know about, because Meta has unlimited money to market it and scale it, which are exorbitantly expensive.
Most people are some combination of lazy, uninformed, stressed, and stupid. Can’t think long term, just trying to get to tomorrow.
Not complicated.
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The value of any social network is its’ users more than anything. They’ll use it in spite of it being super shitty if the people they want to follow are on it.
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Threads basically created “one-click account creation” with Instagram so the onboarding was seamless.
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They capitalized on the Muskification of Twitter.
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We know what enshittification looks like now. Just because you restart it doesn’t mean it’s not obvious where it ends up.
People use threads in 2024?
‘no immediate timeline’ toward monetization
Soo, starting tomorrow
And this is why it’s not a good idea to federate with Threads.
There are myriad reasons not to federate with Threads.
On the contrary, that’s how you get an ad-free access to Threads content.
Ads don’t federate.
bold of you to assume that ads won’t just be disguised as regular posts (and therefore federate)
Edit: after reading the article I heavily suspect ads will federate. As is they are just specially marked posts so I see no reason to think they won’t federate.
No, not bold. You don’t get posts from accounts you don’t follow.
Creating ads as if they are from a person would get Threads instabanned in the EU.
The example shown literally is a regular post simply marked “Sponsored” so it can be assumed that post would federate just like any other post. The only difference being the Sponsor marker likely being a Threads exclusive ActivityPub extension so unless other platforms implement that the post would show up as a regular post on e.g. Mastodon.
Them being in compliance with EU regulations while simultaneously blasting their ads into the Fediverse are not mutually exclusive. There are ways for them to do both. And to be fair here if the ads get federated they will likely be marked as such in some way so other Fediverse platforms should be able to filter the ads out easily.
You don’t get posts from accounts you don’t follow. My server’s global feed only includes posts from accounts people on my server follow.
Just claiming “it will” is not a counter argument. That’s not how the protocol works.
The example shown literally is a regular post simply marked “Sponsored” so it can be assumed that post would federate just like any other post.
Instagram shows its users sponsored posts from accounts you don’t follow. Threads will do the same for users of its website and apps. These posts will not magically show up on Mastodon from accounts one doesn’t follow. If a Mastodon user would follow the profile of a brand, they’d get the posts from that account that would obviously contain promotion (just as any brand is free to join Mastodon right now and promote products there) but as @troed 100% correctly wrote: You don’t get posts from accounts you don’t follow.
Are you aware that a global feed exists on Mastodon?
Are you aware that a global feed exists on Mastodon?
No need for admins to defederate and take away the decision from grownups. Learn how Mastodon works instead of being hysteric because you believe unfounded conspiracy theories.
My instance is defederated from threads. At the time I mildly disagreed with that decision. Federated ads would vindicate that decision. I don’t need threads content that badly.
I don’t need threads content that badly.
You can block entire servers yourself. No need for an instance to defederate.
Yes and this was my reasoning for saying it would be fine to federate. But I’ll point out that federating ads would mean using my server’s infrastructure to serve ads on behalf of someone else. That would cost the admin more money and would require more user donations to keep it going. So just bring able to block isn’t the necessary solution. Not sure that was even your point but I wanted to bring it up.
But I’ll point out that federating ads would mean using my server’s infrastructure to serve ads on behalf of someone else.
Marvel Comics could make an account on any Mastodon server and make posts to promote an upcoming movie. That’s a regular post, containing promotional material. What makes it an ad (or a sponsored post) in IG/Threads terms is to push such posts to users via targeting algorithms who didn’t subscribe to Marvel Comics. Threads cannot do that via ActivityPub, so your Mastodon server cannot serve Threads ads.
Okay. Well I’m not that worried until I see where things are headed. I can see a lot of ways for things to go badly, but no point in borrowing trouble over it.
I mean they do. And I’m sure they will. But as long as you’re not using Threads they can’t be pushed into your feed.
I assume in the future there will probably be an option to “block Threads accounts except the ones that I specifically follow”.
This is how the protocol works.
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You only get content from those you follow (in your home feed).
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Your server’s local feed will contain all posts made by users on your server.
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Your server’s global feed will contain all posts from users someone on your server follows.
Note how #3 isn’t actually a global feed. Spin up your own server at home and it will be the same as your home feed when you’re the only users.
Even if you federate with Threads, there’s simply no way for them to “inject ads” into any of these feeds.
That’s what I said
Sorry, I forgot to make it clear that the point was that your “maybe in the future…” is already the same as how it works now. No difference.
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That’s why they have stealth enshittification techniques to disguise them.
That’s why they have stealth enshittification techniques to disguise them.
Promotional posts don’t magically show up on Mastodon for users who don’t follow the brand account that posted them. That’s not how Mastodon works.
If I were to follow Marvel Comics via Mastodon, boosted a post, then my followers would see the post, just as they would see the post if I made a screenshot from a Marvel tweet and posted that to Mastodon but Marvel posts would not just show up for random Mastodon users just because Marvel paid Meta to promote a post on Threads. Only Threads website and app users would see such posts.
It’s amazing how uninformed Fediverse users are of the basics of how the Fediverse works.
Yeah, I don’t really understand how you are getting downvoted for saying this in various comments.
Are people actually worried they would would see straight up ads coming into their mastodon feeds if their server federates with Threads? That’s a pretty wild assumption to make.
If you follow the Coke brand account, then you’ll see Coke brand posts (even then I wouldn’t consider those “ads” in a traditional sense), but if you follow MBKHD or, hell, the Barack Obama account you won’t have a sudden influx of ads for Pepsi or whatever in your feed.
Are people actually worried they would would see straight up ads coming into their mastodon feeds if their server federates with Threads? That’s a pretty wild assumption to make.
Not only are they worried, they think that this is a foregone conclusion. They think it’s more important to block Threads preemptively than to actually make an informed decision, as if looking if Meta would actually somehow misuse federation and then block them, should that happen. I’ve seen Lemmy instances block Threads before they block any neo-nazi and pedo instances. Seriously, WTF. The hysteria is insane.
I never tried threads even tho it was only popular for 2 weeks
I have tried Threads, and I really can’t recall when was the last time I wasn’t impressed at all by something.
This doesn’t help.the situation at all.
Hell, Musk’s Twitter is a better option to explore than Threads.
