Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flipboard Begins to Federate

flipboard.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 123 posts

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#41

Post by iteratethis »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #40
iteratethis wrote: post #29

Threads is also testing federation, it supposedly is close to being enabled. Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil". This takes away choice at the user level. Normal people that just want to connect with people and content no matter where it is hosted, which is the very purpose o…

It's less "Meta evil" and more, "We've been burned by 3E countless times." This just looks like the first E. The problem is that the incentives to engage in the two remaining Es still exist, and given the same incentives, we can predict the same behavior. It's Econ101.

As soon as Meta turns on federation for Threads, they are the largest Activitypub server, about 10 times larger than all of Mastodon combined.

At the same time, Meta cannot stop non-Threads instances from organizing as they already do.

So I don't see the threat, really.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#42

Post by egypturnash »

iteratethis wrote: post #29

Threads is also testing federation, it supposedly is close to being enabled. Interesting dynamic is that Mastodon's community is such a sour bunch that likely most instance owners will block federation with Threads at the domain level. Because "Meta evil". This takes away choice at the user level. Normal people that just want to connect with people and content no matter where it is hosted, which is the very purpose o…

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.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#45

Post by 57FkMytWjyFu »

tedunangst wrote: post #36
57FkMytWjyFu wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you assumed that I just threw that link in there, and it had nothing to do with my comment. Here is a sample of text from it. "Unwanted 3rd party apps from Microsoft or Flipboard."

You'll have to explain how adding activitypub support is related to that, because I'm not clever enough to follow.

No, I don't.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#46

Post by nocoolnametom »

iteratethis wrote: post #41
kelseyfrog wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less "Meta evil" and more, "We've been burned by 3E countless times." This just looks like the first E. The problem is that the incentives to engage in the two remaining Es still exist, and given the same incentives, we can predict the same behavior. It's Econ101.

As soon as Meta turns on federation for Threads, they are the largest Activitypub server, about 10 times larger than all of Mastodon combined. At the same time, Meta cannot stop non-Threads instances from organizing as they already do. So I don't see the threat, really.

The problem comes with "Extend."

"We've got this new awesome feature, and we asked nicely if it could be put into the ActivityPub docs but they turned us down/didn't act fast enough. So we're proud to announce MetaPub, a superset of ActivityPub that will still communicate with regular ActivityPub, but to get the best and latest features you'll have to implement MetaPub in your clients. Or just use Threads, where it's already present for all users!" Repeat until you gain enough influence that ActivityPub is seen as inferior.

Then comes "Extinguish." Breaking changes to MetaPub reducing federation to only MetaPub clients or give up entirely and turn off federation anyways.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#47

Post by mkl »

yaomtc wrote: post #28
57FkMytWjyFu wrote: post #25

Awesome! One small step to admitting you actually are bloatware! https://medium.com/@kaikoenig/samsungs-bloatware-disgrace-c7...

What does Flipboard have to do with Samsung?

IME Flipboard is one of the few bundled crapware apps on Samsung phones. I got rid of it immediately.

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#48

Post by kpandit »

reqo wrote: post #2

Unrelated. How hard is it to create another “internet” which is completely detached from the current internet?

> How hard is it to create another “internet” which is completely detached from the current internet?

Seems like a good way to explain the meaning "network effect".

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#49

Post by kelseyfrog »

iteratethis wrote: post #41
kelseyfrog wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's less "Meta evil" and more, "We've been burned by 3E countless times." This just looks like the first E. The problem is that the incentives to engage in the two remaining Es still exist, and given the same incentives, we can predict the same behavior. It's Econ101.

As soon as Meta turns on federation for Threads, they are the largest Activitypub server, about 10 times larger than all of Mastodon combined. At the same time, Meta cannot stop non-Threads instances from organizing as they already do. So I don't see the threat, really.

Can I ask how many 3E-ed products you've used in your lifetime?

Re: Flipboard Begins to Federate

#50

Post by threeseed »

nocoolnametom wrote: post #46
iteratethis wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As soon as Meta turns on federation for Threads, they are the largest Activitypub server, about 10 times larger than all of Mastodon combined. At the same time, Meta cannot stop non-Threads instances from organizing as they already do. So I don't see the threat, really.

The problem comes with "Extend." "We've got this new awesome feature, and we asked nicely if it could be put into the ActivityPub docs but they turned us down/didn't act fast enough. So we're proud to announce MetaPub, a superset of ActivityPub that will still communicate with regular ActivityPub, but to get the best and latest features you'll have to implement MetaPub in your clients. Or just use Threads, where it's…

This ignores the role of regulators e.g. EU.

ActivityPub is the first glimpse at a future where social media networks are interoperable over a common standard similar to mail. And from recent history the period we are in is one in where governments are looking for open standards as a hedge against big tech.

The idea that Meta would deliberately harm a standard, shut down competition and invite anti-competition investigations is far-fetched.

Post reply on HN