Meta/Instagram launched a new product called Threads today (working title project92). It adds a new interface for creating text posts and replying to them, using your Instagram account. Of note, Meta has stated that Threads plans to support ActivityPub in the future, and allow federation with ActivityPub services. If you actually look at your Threads profile page in the app your username has a threads.net tag next to it - presumably to support future federation.
Per the link, a number of fediverse communities are pledging to block any Meta-directed instances that should exist in the future. Thus instance content would not be federated to Meta instances, and Meta users would not be able to interact with instance content.
I’m curious what the opinions on this here are. I personally feel like Meta has shown time and time again that they are not very good citizens of the Internet; beyond concerns of an Eternal September triggered by federated Instagram, I worry that bringing their massive userbase to the fediverse would allow them to influence it to negative effect.
I also understand how that could be seen to go against the point of federated social media in the first place, and I’m eager to hear more opinions. What do you think?
I really am split on this, I think that modern corporate media has a big incentive to convince people that we shouldn’t participate in community projects and that working together for the betterment of all is somehow a bad thing because this is what directly affects their monopoly and control.
That said you’re right that other portions of corporate evil benefit by us thinking it has no value.
I do think we need to move away from the pushed ideal that the only benefit to work is money because that really does just benefit the rich - take Wikipedia as an example, writing pages for that isn’t going to earn me money but it allows me to live in a world where Wikipedia exists, and it’s not just me that gets to use it but everyone trying to do anything now has access to that resource which means whatever I do it’s possible that the work I put into editing articles has somehow made it a bit easier or a bit more possible.
This is even more true with open source software, it’s possible that a project I’ve done some small thing to help has grown to benefit the people making point of sale systems that allow a cafe I like to reduce costs and stay in business or maybe the veg was grown by someone that learned how from a YouTube video made using open source software…
AI is already making so many more things possible and when natural language control is better evolved it’s going to have benefits like giving every human on the planet access to world class healthcare, education and tech support, it’s going to allow anyone with an idea to make it reality and to allow open source developers to create really amazing things that we can all use.
If harvesting my throw away comments and old wiki edits can create a tool that will allow me to sit down and describe the electronics projects and coding ideas I want to make then they’re welcome to it.
Hey I just wanted to say first of all, this has been great discussion, I really appreciate it. I guess it all goes back to the original purpose of the internet, which was never meant to be turned into some heavily monetized cash cow for a handful of companies. Open source has created some amazing tools, and I’m a big fan of things like GNU and cc licenses. For me, individuals using whatever I write as a tool is no problem at all. But when it comes to a big company that just wants to scrape data for a LLM, that’s not the same.
This is wild thinking, but like say if they wanted to scrape the lemmyverse, ok, but they had to pay so we could maintain servers etc. We’d all benefit.
Yeah maybe a share-alike clause would be best, use the data if what you’re making is properly free otherwise pay