In other news lemmy engagement is up 200% on the week
Don’t fact check me I pulled this out my ass
Fact checked. Your ass contents appear to be statistically correct.
I checked his ass. It indeed is empty now so he did recently pull something out.
I choose to believe this. Have a good day.
lemmy doesn’t have this kind of data because we don’t have the zucc in our asses.
that’s some serious
good-ass newsgood ass-news
They gave up all their personal data to see a crappy algo-driven social media site. Meta still considers this a win.
They got nothing new. Just a few shitposts from Instagram users saying “I’m on Threads.”
Same thing happened with Mastodon to an extent. Twitter migrants want a platform that is at least as “good” as Twitter.
Mastodon has at least as many features as Twitter, but almost no important users to follow.
Threads has a lot more important users, but far less features than Twitter.
Though Mastodon’s key advantage over Threads, is the fact that people are more willing to “believe” in the Mastodon project. Mastodon had no high-profile controversy yet. It is FOSS, the people are friendly and it is slowly growing organically with a few growth spurts here and there.
Meta Threads has the same image problems as Twitter. Zucc and Musk are probably equally controversial figures. I imagine people mostly joined Threads because of FOMO and group-think. There is no reason for most of them to use it over Twitter.
In the end tho, I don’t see Twitter being de-throned by either of these platforms.
Just: Honestly, we figure Twitter will keep staggering along until its servers implode.
Relevent: https://youtu.be/VbX1r-Vre9o
Are the Threads user numbers being quoted still inflated because everyone with an Instagram account received a shadow Threads account?
I’m pretty sure the platform that kills Twitter will be Twitter. It’s not going to be a question of a superior platform luring people away, Twitter is just going to become unusable because of the management. When that happens, replacements will compete with one another. I don’t personally have an opinion on which is going to win the competition, but I think you make good points about important users vs features.
“Last week, the text-based social media platform reported a record 100 million sign-ups in just five days.”
LOL The biggest bullshit of the year… Meta just created shadow accounts of all Instagram users, without their knowledge or consent…
100 million isn’t that much when it comes to Meta. There’s over 2 billion “active” Instagram users that all were prompted to download the app. That means only 0.005% of Instagram accounts fell for it.
I have no doubt that at least that many people tried it out. When I went to the Android App store, Meta was paying for a front and center promotion of Threads.
Eh… Check your math…
Right? Seems like he is off by a couple digits, unless we are missing something
where have you found 2x10^12 people
Well, technically… they said “users”, not “people”. Maybe there are 2E12-1E8 bots… 🙃
Exactly. Everybody checked what is this about, then stopped gave shit and here we are
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Is there a way to check if a user account exists for my instagram account without logging in?
people reported already having followers before ever using the platform, meaning all people automatically had an account created for them. that (and many other things) is also very legally problematic in the EU which is why the service isnt available here.
It’s not hard to understand what was happening.
- I follow Person A and Person A follows me on Instagram
- Person A signs up for Threads before me
- I sign up for Threads after
- Because we already follow each other on Instagram, Threads automatically made Person A follow me
The issue with the EU is you can’t mingle and mix user data from two separate services.
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“An account was already created for them” because it’s the same Meta account. You can just follow people when you start your account without them necessarily activating threads.
Sole benefit of Brexit identified. We get to hand over our data to meta before you guys. It’s all been worth it.
Not to mention all the spam bots they fail to actually ban after multiple people report.
Bots generate user engagement! Granted, it’s bad engagement, but it also generates jobs for the moderator
AIteams
I’m one of the many who deactivated not too long after it launched. My dashboard was just being filled with so many users (mostly celebrities and influencers) who I don’t recall ever following or even being on my sphere of interest. It doesn’t help that their posts are inorganic attempts to spur engagement.
But, he added, Sensor Tower data suggests a significant pullback in user engagement since Threads’ launch: On Tuesday and Wednesday, the platform’s number of daily active users were down about 20% from Saturday, and the time spent for user was down 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.
strange. my “engagement” on lemmy is… “all day”. strange indeed.
I tried it, because I still have a Facebook account I barely used.
I got like two screens of people I subscribed to and after they are out of new posts the platform tries to push a bunch of popular influencers and brands that I couldn’t care less about. They couldn’t get me to close it faster if they tried.
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Threads never released in the EU in the first place, so this absolutely is not the reason for lowered engagement.
In an indirect way it could be though - not having the entirety of the EU on Threads is a huge non-starter for many people, as many of their favourite influencers, celebrities, companies, etc will be from the EU who were never able to get on it.
It’s pretty hard to start working in the EU if you look at the absolute pile of data that Threads demanded. The GDPR paperwork to make sure they can get away with that AND still comply to GDPR would be more than the whole internet.
What I’m hearing from your statement, is that we need a GDPR-like ruleset in every country.
Yes, we absolutely do.
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I wonder why.
Anyone signing up for a new Meta account isn’t going to be suddenly surprised at how invasive it is. The people who signed up for Threads obviously don’t give a shit about privacy, as much as I’d like to think otherwise.
I’ve had this conversation many times, and they always say something like “I have nothing to hide, so I don’t care”, to which I respond with “I have to hide, either, but nothing I want to share. Since you have nothing to hide and you don’t care, what’s your bank account number, tax ID number, credentials, etc. etc. I won’t use it for anything bad, promise.”
They still don’t get it…
I’ve had some success by asking them to unlock their phone and give it to me so I can read their messages and look at their photos. As they refuse, I tell them “but you just said you’ve got nothing to hide and you don’t care?”
And you could add that you probably wouldn’t learn as much about them by looking at their phone for a few minutes than Threads transmits to Meta every second of every day.
I did that once to a friend of mine, but because he knows me and known I’m trustworthy, he did it hahaha I had to resort to verbalizing the invasive actions I would take when I got the phone so that my point would sink in
Especially since there’s over 2 BILLION Instagram users. Why would anyone who uses Instagram have any concerns with Threads?
This is absolutely not a concern for 99% of people. As much as we (rightfully) scream about it on Lemmy and Mastodon, most people don’t care.
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and others are already collecting this information already, it’s so strange to see people acting like this is a new phenomenon.
We’ve been training AI models since picture based captchas.
Side question: what client is that? It looks amazing
I think it’s “Connect for Lemmy”
Is it because it’s filled to the brim with old memes? That would make me want to leave a new place. Tried kbin social the other day and the first three pages were all full of the old memes being posted here and i spent half an hour or so trying to figure out how to filter them out but couldn’t so I just uninstalled.
Lol I feel like !antiquememesroadshow@lemmy.world polluted a lot of the internet lately.
Look i’m not that much of a curmudgeon that i begrudge people enjoying themselves and getting along, I just need to be able to easily filter content i have no interest in, memes/macros being one of those. I’m still accessing lemmy through mobile browser and can skim past all that quite easily on here, but kbin blew every image up automatically and it was 90% of the content and i couldn’t figure out how to turn it off.
You should just need to block the community. There’s a 🚫 symbol on the sidebar of a community, just click that and the posts should stop showing up on any of your feeds.
If you’re on mobile, the formating is kinda fucked so you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find it.
The problem is that multiple unrelated communities also saw a surge of old memes when the original community blew up
For a while, it felt like Lemmy Shitpost needed to outcompete it.
sure, yeah… I thought it was harmless fun, myself
Oh i see it now! Thanks!
It’s Google Plus all over again.
If people wanted the bird app, they would have already got the bird app, if they don’t like the bird app, they would have got a Mastodon account.
It feels like the same reason that Reels isn’t doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can’t force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.
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Mastodon is almost all 40yo white guys. Source: am one
And Misskey is mostly Japanese artists who need more privacy. Hence, Misskey is a Japanese product, and Japanese Twitter refugees might find Misskey useful. People should join any other Misskey instance instead, if Misskey.io is full.
Weirdly placed comment, but I do think these platforms need the advertising, so do continue to spread the word
I should have been more specific, what I meant was "people who want to use a microblogging platform but don’t like who’s running the bird app. "
But I would say reddit is mainstream enough that random 40 year olds probably has heard of it now, after all the large big profile celebrity AMAs, it’s the 10th most visited site in the world and 6th in the US.
Google+ had more than one thing wrong with it. Just for example …
The precursor to Google+ was called Google Buzz, and it was rolled out to Gmail users in a way that exposed privacy & security problems with Gmail contacts. This led to a lawsuit and a settlement which Google had to obey when releasing their next “social media” attempt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Buzz#Privacy
As a result, Google+ became a heavy-handed effort that tried to hew closely to the settlement’s privacy & consent requirements while assimilating seemingly-unrelated projects such as YouTube comments.
IMHO Google+ had one good thing: Circles. You could define groups of people to share stuff with, without those people having to “join a group”.
I don’t think people understood it well, though.
Mastodon sort of has this.
It feels like the same reason that Reels isn’t doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can’t force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.
I’m never going to download or sign up for TikTok. I know Meta isn’t really that great as far as privacy goes, but at least they don’t share information directly with the CCP. Fuck the CCP. IG Reels works just fine for me. I actually can’t stand the IG home feed because of the algorithm showing me what it wants to show me instead of a chronological timeline of the posts of the people I follow, so I mostly just use IG for stories and Reels.
Unless you live in China, are a Chinese national, or have someone living in China who could be used to blackmail you, then you shouldn’t care much about what data the CCP has on you.
Meta shares data with the NSA and likely any other US allies, so that might be a slight concern if you live in any country like that.
Lemmy makes all its data essentially free for everyone to grab, so… Hi CCP, Hi NSA, Hi CIA, Hi MI6, Hi FSB…
Yeah I hate that curated list bullshit. It made both FB and YouTube worse, too. And both were intended to manipulate users into spending more time there. Ironically, I haven’t been on as many YouTube dives into the random following interesting videos from the recommended ones since they started curating their list based on what you’ve previously watched (and seemingly picking one or two of them to tunnel vision on).
YouTube used to work by showing you videos that other people who watched that video watched, which was really great for music discovery. Now it shows me things that I already watched with a small sprinkling of new things. The front page still suggests things I haven’t seen before related to things I watched. I think they were pressured to make that change because it was taking impressionable people too quickly down rabbit holes of extremism… seems like it still does though.
I miss the old YouTube dives. You never knew where you would end up.
They launched it without addressing the obvious issues like spam and low-quality content. The easy migration from Instagram basically turned threads into… Instragram. Literally the same low quality posts and low quality engagement of Instagram transfered over. Seriously, have you ever read comments on Instagram? It’s the bottom of the barrel in the every sense of the expression. That’s Threads now.
Also, poetically threads on Threads are even harder to follow and navigate than Twitter.
Isnt instagram primarily used for… pictures and images? I seen comments the times i have used it - the comments are generally very low quality and low brow.
I think both of your points are correct but a lot of celebrity types write straight up essays attached to some of their pictures - it’s like where they get out everything they can’t fit into 280 characters.
Makes sense. People are thirsty for a something along the lines of “Twitter, but fewer nazis”, so tons of people checked it out, but it still lacks feature parity with Twitter since it was a rushed-to-market MVP.
I think once it adds on a handful of new features, it’s only a matter of time before audiences gravitate to Threads over a platform whose owner is bragging about funnelling money to human traffickers.
Yeah, the novelty of it will fizzle out. Some will call it their new home. Others will go back to Twitter or other. Some will check back in periodically.
The honeymoon phase is reaching its end
Same with Lemmy. Active users seems to be stalling
Because Lemmy top topic before are only talking about Reddit, and people love talk about it since api contro. Now since Reddit hype are down, people start to think how to make Lemmy topic different and somewhat great than on Reddit I think… So, it takes time to see the average Lemmy users activity…
If they all came from Instagram, or is used to how Instagram is, I’m not suprised this happens. People use Insta for likes only, not comments/discussions. Sadly.
Nope. I’m here
I played around with it and it’s basically useless without a follower only feed. And the posts tend to just basically disappear forever after a feed refresh.
But if they follow through on ActivityPub integration I’ll be stoked to follow all the normies that couldn’t get by on mastodon that are using threads. More content = more better.
I won’t be happy if they integrate federation. Ever heard the phrase “embrace, extend, extinguish”? It’s a tactic used by large companies to squash growing competition.
Google used it, for example, to squash a growing open-source chat messenger protocol called XMPP. (Think of XMPP like ActivityPub.) Google allowed its Google Talk application to integrate with people using XMPP. (They embraced XMPP.)
Then, they added their own proprietary features that wouldn’t work with normal XMPP users. (They extended, or built on top of, XMPP.)
Then, they cut support for XMPP integration, leaving it effectively dead in the water. XMPP users suddenly had a list of Google Talk users in their friend list who would never appear online again, whereas Google Talk users maybe had one or two people in their friend list who looked like they’d moved on from Google Talk. (They extinguished XMPP.)
Now imagine that happening with Threads. You, a Mastodon user, follow a bunch of people who just happen to be on Threads. There are some things Threads users can do that you can’t, but you don’t really mind. It works well enough. Then, one day, Threads stops working with Mastodon. Suddenly, over half of the people you followed are no longer available to you. The only way you can follow them again… is to join Threads.
“ever heard of embrace extend extinguish???”
Lololol yes. And the ploum article people parrot about xmpp too.
There is a lot of groupthink in the fediverse and not enough critical thinking.
Threads integrating will highlight the serious value in activitypub. I personally don’t know why they would integrate unless they want to just completely dismember Twitter and blue sky or get in front of govt regulations.
The danger here is that Threads will suddenly be > 99% of the activity and user base in one fell swoop. You might find that Mastodon doesn’t scale as well as you think. It might also be that Threads deliberately or half assedly doesn’t federate properly, so that being a non-Threads user means posts aren’t visible inside of Threads or suffer from down ranking or other issues.
I’d add that historically federation hasn’t gone well when a big fish enters a small pond. XMPP was cited above as an example of that. At the time you had proprietary services like AOL / AIM, ICQ, Instant Messenger. XMPP was going to liberate us from proprietary and even Google got on board for a bit before dumping it.
The problem with big companies is they want all the cake to themselves and abhor having to yield control or cooperate with others. Meta might make nice noises about ActivityPub while they’re the underdog to Twitter but you could see them rapidly change their tune if Twitter went under.
I’m surprised I don’t hear as much of “I wan’t literally nothing to do with Meta in any way shape or form” sentiment (which happens to be my feelings on the matter).
Federation is the most interesting thing thats happened on the internet since http became the standard in my opinion, and I’ve been kicking around since Telnet, BBCs, IRC, Etc.
Meta doesn’t want to play nice, they want to see if they can own everything, in my opinion. “Oh, people are doing this cool thing that we can’t yet monitize and make our shareholders richer? See if we can somehow assimilate it, at a loss at first, as ususal of course.”
I’m not sure about embrace, extend, extinguish, but it does sound like it’d be the way here. Either way, why the living fuck can we not have anything interconnected that a megacorp can’t decide they’ll take over? Why can’t we keep that from happening, even when small independent individuals are running the server?
The entire point of ActivityPub is that it’s open and EEE-proof. If the users leave it for something proprietary but better, then it isn’t EEE, it’s just a better product.
Simply being open source is not an achievement in itself. The platform has to be user friendly, stable and future-proof. Most FOSS and federated alternatives create a platform and then endlessly harp on federation like that’s the end. No, that’s the beginning. The point is to make a product better than Big Tech WHILE maintaining federation and Foss status. THAT is what makes a platform EEE proof.
If the users leave it for something proprietary but better, then it isn’t EEE, it’s just a better product.
That’s literally the second E, extend.
Nothing is EEE-proof. If Meta puts even just 10 billion dollars into developing and marketing their fediverse EEE project, it’s going to be better for the average user (I.e: billions of people already using Meta’s services) than what a couple of FOSS devs made for free in their spare time.
That’s not what extend means in this context. In this context, extend means to add non-standard features to the protocol which only your implementation understands.
If they embrace ActivityPub and then start adding their own proprietary features that are enough for users to switch over, and Mastodon doesn’t, then it’s not an “evil agenda”, it’s Meta adding an essential feature that the users want and Mastodon isn’t able to add and ultimately Meta making a better product.
If Mastodon or Lemmy are truly superior and the future, then the product should be the best in the market, not DUE to federation but DESPITE it.
That’s one thing that everyone here forgets because right now federation is hard to get into, and the only people here are those who put the effort in because they believe in federation. That is the reason for their tolerance in an inferior product. But if that’s the case, then it will never be mainstream as long as the product is inferior.
ActivityPub is open source. This means, by definition, Meta are allowed to use it. They could easily do the extinguish part by just never using the protocol. If another platform existing is such a threat to the Fediverse then we’re doomed to failure in the first place.
While Google removing XMPP no doubt helped sink nails into the coffin, WhatsApp played a bigger role in the death of XMPP than Google removing it from Talk. It was increasingly irrelevant for a now growing number of people.
The point of “embrace, extend, extinguish” is primarily to get rid of any potential future competition. So, for example, it would not work if Facebook tried to do it with Twitter since the latter already reached critical mass and can stand on its own without outside help, barring bad leadership. It typically only works if the party that’s being “embraced” is smaller than the company that’s “embracing”.
To your point of ActivityPub being open source: that’s true, so Meta is, legally speaking, free to use it. However, barring any restrictions in the license, they’re also free to add any proprietary features to Threads that don’t work on Mastodon. It’s similar to Google Chrome: Google has their open-source Chromium web browser, but they also have a version called Chrome that has features that are not open-source.
I would compare Mastodon with Threads to Linux with the Wine compatibility layer.
People used to hold off on using Linux, because they did not want to lose their Windows software. Now with Wine, people are a lot less reliant on Windows and many Linux users and Microsoft competitors profit from this.
The Steam Machine was reliant on native Linux games, but almost nobody wanted to develop for a niche desktop OS, which led to less games on the platform, which made Linux even more niche for gamers …
That’s a big reason the Steam Machine failed.
The Steam Deck side-steps all of this with Wine. Now Linux can grow freely, even when developers ignore Linux completely. Wine gives Linux a fighting chance against Windows.
The same way I believe, that Mastodon will only get a fighting chance, if they can side-step the “nobody I know uses Mastodon” problem. Federation with Threads could be one solution to this.
The thing with Wine is that, from what I understand, it was made to help Windows software run on Linux. From the beginning, its primary intention was to help Linux users. Facebook’s primary intention is to get more money. If they believe extinguishing Mastodon will further that goal, they’ll do it. Unfortunately, I don’t believe Mastodon is big enough to make Thread users think they’ll be missing any significant amount of content if Facebook removed ActivityPub support.
