What Happened With Threads and the Fediverse
Jon Henshaw (via Jeff Johnson):
Jon Henshaw: I got pretty excited when Zuckerberg and Meta were being serious about integrating ActivityPub into Threads. And a lot of people I knew were just like, “It’s not going to happen,” and “They’re going to screw it up,” but I thought it was going to be for real this time. And The Verge had a couple of good interviews that convinced me they were committed to it. However, while I saw some really nice updates come through, I also saw some that weren’t so great. It felt like they were making poor choices, likely because of their legal department.
Eugen Rochko: That’s exactly how I would put it. It’s like Cambridge Analytica burned them, and they didn’t want a repeat. And that really limited what they could do. I obviously cannot speak for them. I haven’t spoken to anyone from their side for a long time now. But from our discussions when they were launching it, they asked questions about implementation details and how to do different things. It turned out they couldn’t do things because of their legal department, which was highly disappointing. I think the product they launched was promising, but it didn’t deliver to the very end. The whole concept of having federation behind an additional opt-in that people are not even aware of is not helpful, and there are a couple of details that are designed so carefully that it’s almost alienating, like how the pop-up appears every 30 days, asking users if they still want to continue fediverse sharing. As if it’s like, “my god, like I didn’t know, stop that.”
[…]
ER: I think what happened is that the engineers who were working on Threads were excited to do something decentralized and participate in the Fediverse. And before it launched, they felt like, on an organizational level, they needed to promise something different to Twitter, some more freedom to creators to move around, to have this decentralization that would basically provide a layer of security against things happening on Twitter for them to gain market share. But as it turned out, once they launched, they still got a lot of users, and their priorities quickly shifted. So instead of focusing on missing fediverse features, it became, “We need to build an NBA score widget into the sidebar,” or something like that. And I think that the only way to put this back on their roadmap is for more companies, platforms, and communities to make the fediverse a bigger part of their strategy, which will push them to refocus on it.
Laurens Hof (2024):
PeerTube has launched their mobile apps for Android and iOS. A major new feature of the apps is that it allows people to create a local account on their phone. A major barrier for PeerTube adoption is that it is hard to get a PeerTube account: with a PeerTube account you can upload videos, and most server admins only give out accounts sparingly due to costs and moderation concerns. Now this issue can be sidestepped by having a PeerTube account that is not tied to a specific PeerTube server at all. For people who want to use PeerTube just to browse and view videos this makes the platform more accessible.
PeerTube also talks about the struggles of launching their app on the stores: both Google and Apple have been very relunctant to allow such apps. Apple’s stringent policy on payment links means that they do not allow any PeerTube server to appear in the PeerTube iOS app if the PeerTube server has donation link on their server.
As a result, both the Android app and iOS app have very limited whitelisted servers that the app can actually connect to. PeerTube’s connections to the entire fediverse is limited to just a few servers, because of how Apple and Google control access.
Another banger from Hank Green on why Threads fucking sucks. His benign attempt to get attention from his followers for his charity-oriented store during Black Friday was served to basically none of his audience. It wasn't rage bait and it included a link off the platform: the poison combination for Threads to have any interest in showing that post to people.
Then he decided to try making snarky replies to other rage bait posts and include the link to the store in those posts. Turns out, that was a much more winning strategy for him, and he got a lot more views on those posts, which drove a lot more sales at his store. That's business in 2025, babyyyy.
Previously:
- Mastodon CEO Steps Down
- A Complete Guide to Bluesky
- Threads in EU and on ActivityPub
- Twitter Delays URLs for Certain Sites
- Twitter Restricts Substack Links
1 Comment RSS · Twitter · Mastodon
"Then he decided to try making snarky replies to other rage bait posts and include the link to the store in those posts. Turns out, that was a much more winning strategy for him"
Social media sites like Twitter and Threads are at an unholy juncture where the company providing the service is incentivized to make people angry at each other[1], and outside actors are incentivized to use these services to make people angry at each other[2].
Being on these sites quite literally drives people insane. The endgame of social media enshittification is an anger machine, and the only way to win is not to play.
If these companies could all just die, we'd all be better off, and democracies might actually have a chance at survival.
[1]: Facebook intentionally boosts polarizing content because it increases engagement.
[2]: Twitter's "About this Account" feature revealed that numerous popular, highly polarizing political accounts like Maga Nation and America First were based in places like Bangladesh, Thailand, Nigeria, or Eastern Europe.
