There should be a Moratorium after Threads

What Matters: Decentralizing the Mastodon Privacy Plan for Meta-owned Twitter and the Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp of the Musk Era

With the backing of Meta, Threads has a team of engineers that volunteer-run networks like Mastodon can’t rival. People can also post Threads directly to their Instagram stories. Adam Mosseri, the head of social network Instagram, wrote yesterday that Threads will eventually support ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, which would let people take their followers to another service if they ever left the app.

The platform also arrives at a particularly weak moment for Twitter. On the heels of his announcement that free accounts could not see more than 600 concurrenttweets a day, Musk was met with mockery. The crises that have been ongoing throughout Musk’s tenure will likely be worsened by such moves.

It might be a jarring reminder, but this is par for the course with Meta-owned apps, which the company monetizes by selling targeted ads and personalized marketing. Facebook and Instagram’s iOS apps list even more categories than Threads, the Messenger app lists about as many, and even the secure messaging app WhatsApp discloses nine categories of “Data Linked to You.” So for people fed up with Twitter’s rapidly deteriorating platform (and vibes), a Meta-owned alternative—with its predictability and relative stability—could even potentially appeal to those who are generally concerned about data privacy.

ActivityPub will soon be supported by Threads, but it isn’t necessarily a sign of confidence. The company has spent over a decade working on its promise of default end-to-end encryption on Messenger. But incorporating decentralization into Threads, and specifically supporting ActivityPub, has reportedly been a core aspect of Meta’s vision for the app from the beginning. Meta has also already sketched out details of the plan in its supplemental privacy policy for Threads.

There is a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers as a result of the fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub. Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko wrote in a post ahead of Threads launch that it puts pressure on platforms to provide better, less exploitative services.

Mark bragged about his desire to take over the broken social network on Wednesday, a day after Threads’ launch. He wrote that he had the opportunity but hadn’t nailed it. “Hopefully we will.”

Bluesky, Mastodon, Post news, Spoutible, Co Host, Hive Social, and T2 Social are just a few of the platforms that will have to be beat by Meta.

Early reviews from online types are not very positive. It was funny that the Zuck rolled out a Twitter killer and it took less than 24h for everyone to think it was an Ass, according to writer Noah Kulwin. So there’s no guarantee the early adopters on Threads will stick around. The platform could become a replica of the original TikTok, destined to be kept from public view by dorks.

How to Draw a Line in the Sand: Why Twitter? Why Twitter needs to get out of the mud, not to be wall-crossed

What is painfully clear is that we, the people of the internet, need to draw a line in the sand. Then we need to dump concrete into that line so it cannot be swiftly eroded by waves, or whatever.

No one can stop tech companies from launching new platforms. People can refuse to join. It is tooting the same words to slightly different audiences as well as skeeting and microbagging and it is obnoxious. Adding threading to the mix is too much. I’ve already seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, copying and pasting to skeet a tweet. It’s no way to live.

It’sunlikely that we can reproduce the dynamic Twitter cultivated. It won’t be possible if these clones keep coming, which will make it impossible for them to achieve the network effect needed to function as a true hub for public discourse. None of the current substitutes is perfect, but diluting the pool further will only weaken our existing options. I’d like to see Twitter restored to its pre-Musk functionality—but if that’s not going to happen, I’d rather pick one of the many wannabe water coolers I’ve already downloaded instead of cycling through imitator after imitator.