Meta dropping Twitter competitor on Thursday

bnew

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NOSaintsFan02

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I guess user experience is different cuz yeah Threads got a lot of sign-ups but a lot of the people I'm following haven't used it since the weekend. That's always going to be the key: sustainability.

My gut tells me people who were heavy on Twitter will still prioritize Twitter over Threads, especially during football and basketball season and major live events. It's gonna take Elon colossally fukking the app (which I wouldn't put it past him) to have Twitter lose their lead on Threads.
 

bnew

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út 11. 7. 2023 v 4:53 odesílatel Ben Savage <btsavage@meta.com> napsal:

> Hello everyone,
>
> My name is Ben Savage, and I'm Meta's AC Rep to the W3C. I have just
> joined the Social Web Incubator Community Group. This thread seems like a
> good opportunity to introduce myself =).
>
> I'm a software engineer, and I've spent the last 10 years at Meta.
>
> I've been involved in the W3C since 2019, where I've been working on
> privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs), and their application to
> advertising. I mainly participate in the "Private Advertising Technology
> Community Group", where I'm a co-author of the "Interoperable Private
> Attribution" (IPA) proposal that we've developed together with our friends
> at Mozilla.
>
> I'm a newb to the ActivityPub standard, but I'm excited to start attending
> the group's meetings, learning more, and hopefully contributing back to the
> community.
>
> I'm really excited that Meta plans to implement the ActivityPub standard,
> and federate with other instances. I'm really interested to see how this
> interoperable future plays out!
>
> According to that link shared earlier in the chain (
> Threads User Count Tracker) it seems like Threads is
> already over 100 M. Wow. That exceeded my wildest expectations! I agree
> that this seems like a significant event in the history of the fediverse.
>
> What can Meta do to support the fediverse? How can we ensure our entry to
> this ecosystem is a positive thing that helps grow the community? How can
> we support this standard? These are the questions in my mind, and I'm
> really keen to start discussing this with all of you.
>
> I do not see any upcoming events on the calendar - are there regular group
> calls? How does this group prefer to operate?
>
> I'm looking forward to getting to know all of you, and working together.
>
 

bnew

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Threads Adopting ActivityPub Makes Sense, but Won’t Be Easy​

Threads will soon connect its 100 million users to the fediverse via ActivityPub. But Meta faces a number of technical and social challenges.


Jul 12th, 2023 7:21am by Richard MacManus
Featued image for: Threads Adopting ActivityPub Makes Sense, but Won’t Be Easy


From a developer point of view, the fact that Meta’s Threads app has quickly gone over 100 million sign-ups isn’t the most interesting part of this latest Twitter clone. More intriguing is Meta’s promise to make Threads a part of the fediverse, by adding support for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) ActivityPub specification.

The fediverse is a collection of decentralized social media services that interconnect via ActivityPub. The most prominent member of the fediverse is Mastodon, a microblogging network that launched in 2017. But many other Web 2.0-style apps have been built on ActivityPub — including Bookwyrm (Goodreads), Lemmy (Reddit), PeerTube (YouTube), and PixelFed (Flickr).

I reached out to Meta for further comment on its proposed ActivityPub support. I was told that Meta has more to share about this, but not right now. Regardless, we know enough to do some early analysis on how Threads might support ActivityPub and what it will mean for current fediverse applications (especially microblogging ones, like Mastodon).

What Is Threads and How Will It Join the Fediverse​

First, let’s clarify what Threads is. It looks and feels a lot like Twitter — “posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length.” But it is also noticeably influenced by Instagram. First and foremost, Threads inherits Instagram’s social graph — you’re invited to log in to Threads using your Instagram account, and with one click you can choose to follow the same people you already follow on Instagram.

The algorithm driving the home feed is also very similar to Instagram — it’s not a straight chronological feed, but a “‘black box” that delivers you a mix of content from people you follow along with trending content from celebrities and influencers. The lack of a straight chronological feed has been one of the main criticisms so far of Threads; in response, Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has said that a feed of just the people you follow is being worked on.

37bd93e0-threads2.jpg

Threads also inherits the slick UI of Instagram.

Threads was built by the Instagram team (under Meta’s banner), and so Instagram’s help page on Threads is useful context about its plans to join the fediverse. Instagram states:

“Our vision is that Threads will enable you to communicate with people on other fediverse platforms we don’t own or control. This means that your Threads profile can follow and be followed by people using different servers on the fediverse.”

Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko was cautiously optimistic about Threads on the day of its release. In a blog post, Rochko said that it was “validation of the movement towards decentralised social media” and “a clear victory for our cause.”

Incidentally, Meta’s announcement stated that “Threads is Meta’s first app envisioned to be compatible with an open social networking protocol.” So Meta might end up supporting more than just ActivityPub — but it’s too early to speculate about that.

Why Meta Chose to Support ActivityPub​

It’s no coincidence that Meta chose ActivityPub and not an alternative decentralized protocol for its Threads product. Certainly, ActivityPub is the most mature “fediverse” protocol, but there are others out there — such as Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid and Bluesky’s AT Protocol. But ActivityPub perfectly suits Meta’s goals, I suspect, and here’s why:

With ActivityPub, the server manages your identity and data. So when you join Mastodon, for example, you are essentially entrusting management of your data to the server (“instance”) you join. As fediverse developer Ryan Barrett put it in a post this week, your ActivityPub “identity, data, and administration are all tied to your instance, for both technical and cultural reasons.” Among other things, this architecture enables your instance to make moderation decisions on your behalf. You’re still free to move to another instance, at any time and for whatever reason, but you can’t port your data (your posts and media) from one instance to another.

I mention all this because it plays right into Meta’s strengths. Meta will still control the identity layer even when it integrates with ActivityPub — and that’s immensely valuable when you’re the owner of Instagram’s social graph. Since Threads is also hosted on Meta’s servers, all your data is managed by Meta too.

There’s no way Meta would’ve wanted to join the AT Protocol or Solid, because in both cases they would potentially be handing over control of identity and at least some data to their users. As Barrett put it in a separate post: “One core difference between the fediverse and the AT Protocol seems to be that AT decouples many key building blocks — identity, moderation, ranking algorithms, even your own data to some degree — from your server.”

Challenges for Meta and Threads​

This week a representative from Meta, a software engineer named Ben Savage, joined the ActivityPub working group in the W3C. Savage is based in Singapore and has worked at Meta/Facebook for over ten years. He says he’s represented Facebook in W3C forums like the Private Advertising Technology Community Group and the Privacy Community Group, and he seems genuinely keen to help Threads adopt ActivityPub. “I’m really excited for the moment when ActivityPub integration is launched and I can start following my friends on Mastodon,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post about his assignment.

Evan Prodromou, one of the creators of ActivityPub and who runs a weekly “issue triage live session” for the ActivityPub working group, gave Savage a warm welcome.

But unsurprisingly, others gave him a less than warm welcome (“The company you work for does disgusting things,” wrote one member, citing as an example that Meta “builds walls and lures people into them”). There’s also a small group of Mastodon instances that are threatening to “defederate” from Threads if it joins the fediverse — meaning they won’t include Threads users in their extended networks. This doesn’t seem to be a widespread feeling among Mastodon maintainers, but it does illustrate the social pressure that Meta will face as it moves forward with its plan to adopt ActivityPub.

There are, of course, also technical challenges that will need to be overcome. As another W3C working group member, Johannes Ernst, put it, “I think one of the things we are all very interested in learning is just what exact stack of protocols Meta is implementing, and then the higher-level policies not prescribed in the standard.” Ernst pointed out that “merely implementing ActivityPub in itself is not sufficient to produce interoperable software nor make what’s happening comprehensible to users.” For example, which of the activity types will Threads implement? Will it allow hyperlinks and HTML markup? These are the specific kinds of technical questions that Threads will need to address in the coming months.

Conclusion​

It’s early days, but in my humble experience Threads feels like a text-based version of Instagram: the content is a mix of aspirational and motivational, and the current algorithmic timeline is peppered with celebrities and influencers peddling their memes. Perhaps the biggest challenge integrating with fediverse apps like Mastodon will be the cultural differences between the two communities.

That said, there will always be at least a few people you want to connect with on alternative networks — and that’s the beauty of ActivityPub. So, if nothing else, I hope Meta does successfully adopt the protocol so that Mastodon users like me can add a few Threads users to their feeds. The ideal outcome would be a bunch of new apps getting built that tap into both Mastodon and Thread’s social graphs, but I think that’s too pie-in-the-sky right now. Let’s just get the two networks connected first.
 

bnew

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anybody here a javascript a programmer? on friday I noticed that threads changed their url structure.

old threads post url:
https://www.threads.net/t/CuiTZi9PFqU

new threads post url:
https://www.threads.net/@waxpancake/post/CuiTZi9PFqU

threads is serious about integrating mastodon

threads.net/embed.js exists just like embed.js exists on all mastodon instances.

when i saw that I decided to try the '/embed' endpoint and it worked

https://www.threads.net/@waxpancake/post/CuiTZi9PFqU/embed

I tried modifying the mastodon userscript i made to view mastodon links as embeds on the coli like we can view twitter posts but the iframe always creates a scrollbar.
this is the regular expression pattern that detects both mastodon post urls and threads posts urls

^https?:\/\/([a-z\d-_]+\.)*([a-z\d-_]+)\.([a-z]{2,})(\/@[a-zA-Z0-9-_]+\/\d+|\/@[a-zA-Z0-9-_]+\/post\/\w+)

I replaced the regular expression on this line between the '/' .

const mastodonRegex = /^https?:\/\/([a-z\d-_]+\.)*([a-z\d-_]+)\.([a-z]{2,})(\/@[a-zA-Z0-9-_]+\/\d+)/;


not a programmer so if anyone could look at the code and figure out how to get the embedded link to fit properly without needing to scroll inside the iframe that'd be great.
 

Formerly Black Trash

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Deray McKesson is part of the app team

I ain't fukking with it
I jumped on(I’m a hypocrite sorry)

Uh I like it

It’s different enough from twitter

I think it’s a 90 page character limit but you can stack pages on top of it

Each thing you post is like a page and you can make a gif your back ground

I hope it gets more organic growth and lasts
 
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