A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
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Threads has not yet launched in Europe due to regulatory issues
LOL no, there are no "regulatory issues". Meta itself expects Threads to be illegal in the EU. Which is probably correct. And they do not seem to be having a problem with it. Which is fine by me.
Threads has not launched in Europe because it breaks European laws. Yet 100M people jumped straight on it.
From my understanding, people haven't "jumped on it", they were effectively pushed from existing Meta accounts.
I am willing to be corrected, but from what I understand from my online friend (who is Indian (living in the region) and reports on tech with a focus on India, Asia and Southeast Asia), a lot of Threads’ early adoption is entrenchment. For instance, most of India’s IG users migrated to Threads, and that was part of the initial 10 million.
I just don’t think that we can look at Threads’ adoption rates in the same way as, say, we look at Mastodon or even early Twitter. Threads is built upon an existing base: Instagram. Meta even pre-made your Threads account if you have IG. I mean, technically I have a Threads account, sitting there, in the shadows. I also have an Excite account. And I dug up my MySpace account in a fit of pique (and then remembered why I left MySpace all those years ago). But having something and using something are different.
That not to say that Threads isn’t going to end up as Meta’s “revenge” just that the adoption is not necessarily because Threads is better, but that the entire social media monetization culture is pre-built through Instagram; and there not only is no barrier to entry, but you can stumble into the Threads “garden” with ease. It’s basically the same model Microsoft used to bootstrap Windows using the pre-installed DOS base. And it will succeed because the outreach mechanisms are already in place.
That doesn’t change my mind about choosing Mastodon. I have different online handles for different needs. I lost my original IG handle many years ago, so made one using my real name to lurk on IG; so my Threads handle will end up being my real name, and that’s a show stopper for using the platform. My real name social media are “honey pots” to keep nosey companies out of my hair and ways to keep an eye on my squirrelly remnants of a family. I have no desire to post anything on my real name Threads identity.
This is why killing it by defederating was never going to happen. We can only protect ourselves.
Now if only my feed can only show the accounts I'm actually following
What’s profitable about that? Just a thing that’s useful and relevant to your interests?
Well I guess that's at least one good thing about Threads
This is a moment when I'd love to use the "you love to see it" meme comment, but it's more like... "People are fleeing the burning building, and running across the street to an identical building that is infested with rats and cockroaches!"
Maybe an optimistic take: people moving = people realising they can move. Eventually some of them may also realise they can move to a platform that’s not controlled by a shitty corpo.
And can instead move to a platform that is controlled by a rando instance owner with their own set of quirks and foibles. And can choose amongst thousands of such instances, each controlled by a different rando with a different set of quirks and foibles. Out of the frying pan and into the fire indeed.
It's more like realizing that you're surrounded by fire, so you might as well pick a patch with a nice view.
Which is why I like Beehaw.
And can choose amongst thousands of such instances
Kinda glossing over that point.
That's a good point. Plus they won't be as embedded in the new place as they won't have 10+ years of history on it. So moving becomes easier generally
"Out of the frying pan, into the fire"
"...and running across the street to an identical building that is infested with rats and cockroaches!"
Still better than Nazis.
Meta has contributed to genocide, which is worse than I can (currently) say about musk
wait what 😅 context?
I love it when people come with receipts.
Yeah, about that …
Threads has those too.
Fediverse has a lot of them too
Unfortunately true.
LibsofTiktok is approved there, so I'm not so sure. Not overwhelmingly Nazi, but Nazis are welcome as long as they don't say slurs kind of thing that centrists like.
They may not say the slur, but they encode it.
Exactly, because that's the line for centrists. Bigoted and hateful statements are perfectly acceptable in cynical corporate "neutral" spaces if they're framed "politely." As long as the bad words aren't used, they're permitted. Libsoftiktok wants nothing less than the total elimination of certain populations of people and there's no way in reality that that should be an acceptable topic of political discussion regardless of word choice.
While ranking the misdeeds of billionaires is a tricky business, given the choice I'd say Zuck is slightly better than Musk at the moment. :)
Hard disagree there. Facebook contributed to literal genocide. Elon is just an asshole.
Don't think that meta turning into even more of a global social megacorp that controls everything a lot of people seee and interact with day to day is a good thing tbh.
Most people happily exchange one master for another without thinking much about it
To be fair, the change isn’t really affecting them, so why should they care. As long as they still have their favourite celebs it doesn’t really matter to them who owns the platform
It's the time between masters that is interesting and unpredictable and just fun
Yeah - stuff like this should REALLY be public infrastructure
I know a lot of people are opposed to the state running things but I really wouldn't mind if there was a well-managed state-run federated instance for all of this
at least with Matrix Europe is already doing something like this since it's the de-facto-standard for a lot of the internal chats - but there really needs to be a push to make it more popular.
Having the kind of "lock-in" that Meta has where their userbase alone is an argument of using their service is horrible since it makes every competition futile...
From the perspective of someone in the UK, the ongoing shift in government and society towards openly discriminatory/suppressive policies aimed at some minorities (trans people, certain ethnic/cultural groups) and the accompanying moral panics to that effect make the idea of the state running, monitoring and controlling social media as a utility a bit terrifying - particularly for something so fundamental to modern life.
A lot of the issues with centralised social media in private hands would just be intensified if the state were directly running the show - it can’t be trusted to act as a benign, responsible steward.
Cool, fleeing one megacorp run by a huge tool for another megacorp run by a huge tool
Is this considered masochism? This seems like masochism.