There are literally, not exaggerating, over one billion Instagram accounts in existence. It’s self-evidently not the case that they have just silently registered everybody a Threads account and are counting those numbers.

Nice, thanks for the tip! Found a couple more recurring cast and added them to the list.

Meta is categorically evil, but the pretty obvious gain from federation is the same as it is federating with anything else: content. Threads has people posting on it, some of those people say interesting things … the end.

That’s not to say that outweighs the downsides, like some of that content will also undoubtedly be hateful bigoted trash, and the moderation load of suddenly dealing with an order of magnitude more posts will be a huge strain on fediverse admins who choose to federate, but there’s undeniably something to gain.

I think what did it for me was episode 3, “About a Girl”. Up to that point I was enjoying the show, but the third episode was the first one that you’re really supposed to take seriously as an audience. I think this quote from the episode’s director Brannon Braga is informative:

There was an episode that was supposed to be a later episode. I’ll call “About a Girl” which was about a transgender metaphor using our Moclan characters. […] It’s a very dramatic episode. And we decided to pull it up in the air date order to the third episode because we had to know, “Is the audience going to embrace what this show really is?” And they did.

The episode isn’t perfect and MacFarlane has even said he would do it differently if given the opportunity to write the episode again, but the show was leaving nothing on the table, taking a huge swing for this early in a series. I had been really missing sci-fi with a social conscience in the last decade or so before The Orville began, and this episode specifically felt like coming home after a long time.

From Tom’s Threads (sorry).

J. Lee also posted a BTS photo, anybody recognize the episode?

Behind the scenes shot of J. Lee as John LaMarr in engineering

Definitely. Meta is studiously only sharing the number of accounts registered. We have no idea how many of those are active. If we go with the old 1-9-90 rule, only about 10 million of those 100 million will become active users. Although, the rule obviously isn’t a universal constant. On the fediverse, for example, it’s closer to ⅓ of registered users that are active.

This is untrue. Threads accounts are reserved for the matching Instagram user, but those users have to actually choose for that account to be opened. If all Instagram accounts were auto-converted to Threads accounts there’d be over 1 billion Threads accounts. The 100 million Threads users are all people who have specifically opted to have a Threads account.

In fairness, I think we might already be the rest who don’t matter. Threads has just passed 100 million users in like three days. The entire fediverse, in about ten years (it’s tough to pin down an exact start date because “When did it become the fediverse?”), has accrued around 12 million users, of which less than 4 million are active. There’s any number of things Meta might want, but I don’t think greater access to 4 million geeks is at the top of their list.

I do think the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns have some merit. Meta isn’t threatened by the fediverse now, but maybe they do want to kill it before it becomes a problem. In the short term, though, we’re not overtaking Threads. Personally, I think another plausible theory is that Threads is using ActivityPub to demonstrate that they’re not running a monopoly or gatekeeping control of social media (which the EU’s new Digital Markets Act now regulates) by pointing to the fediverse–which will soon also include direct competitors Tumblr–and saying “See, we’re all on equal footing! We don’t control social media! Look over there at those 4 million geeks and whatever number of Tumblr users.”

It comes from Fortune, they can’t conceive of something that’s not a business.

Hard to tell. It’s been in decline since January though, so some of it is just Twitter being a place people want to be less and less.

Defederation and the Dutch

Here’s the graph, as posted by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:

Twitter DNS rankings over time, Jan-Jul 2023

Get us a photo of the popsicle stick skyscraper before it burns down.

Lemmy communities are “groups” in ActivityPub parlance, and groups do exist on the microblogging platforms. Using Mastodon as an example for now, a Masto user could find the group equivalent to a Lemmy community and make a post and/or comment there and it would show up on lemmy.world and anybody else who federates with that Masto instance. In reality, the groups experience is kind of terrible and a poor interface to these thread-style communities, and you lose all kinds of features like the recency/score sorting algorithm, the ability to downvote things, etc.

It would take a true masochist to post to lemmy.world from Mastodon, which is why you almost never see it. I’ve seen one Mastodon user in my time on the threadiverse so far. Most people who are already on the microblogging side of the fediverse have just chosen to register a separate account on a threadiverse instance so they can have an actual usable interface rather than stuffing a link aggregator through a blog-shaped hole.

Groups don’t even exist on Threads currently. Maybe they will by the time they implement ActivityPub, but they may not consider that to be a core goal as a microblogging, Twitter-style platform which has no obvious use for them. This would currently make Threads an even worse interface to the threadiverse (kind of ironic) than Mastodon, which I can’t stress enough is already awful. You would just have to search for individual posts by browsing somewhere like lemmy.world directly, copying and pasting the URLs into the Threads app or web site to populate the conversation in their interface in order to reply to the posts and comments there.

In short, using Lemmy via Threads is probably going to be such a nightmare that only turbo-nerds will try to do it, and turbo-nerds are more likely to realize “This is awful and I should just go join Lemmy or kbin or something,” than persist with that hassle long-term. Now, kbin users have more justification to be concerned about how Threads will impact their communities, because kbin supports microblogging directly–in corporate terms, it’s like if Reddit and Twitter combined into one site that you could tab between on the fly. This means kbin users will be more likely to see Threads content and vice versa.

The other problem here is that I don’t think a lot of people actually know how defederation works. There’s lots of takes like “I don’t want Meta to get my data, so we have to defederate.” But defederating stops you from receiving their content, not the other way around. Once Threads actually is federating, defederating it will stop people seeing posts from Threads users. That has its own merits, but it doesn’t protect your data in any way. If you don’t want corporate entities to access your online posts, either send them via some private end-to-end encrypted system where only you and the direct recipients can see them, or don’t post them online at all. The Internet is on the Internet.

Now, a bit more of an explanation on what defederation is: while the decentralized nature complicates things (since different servers will have different defederation lists), defederation is closer to a Reddit shadow-ban than whatever it is people are imagining. If literally everybody defederated Meta/Threads, they would still see our content, but from their (Threads users’) perspective, it would just seem like we’re all giving them the silent treatment, because we never respond to their posts or comments.

“Maybe the worst bluff I’ve ever seen.” - Michael Bluth

Yeah, they can vote and reply and all of that and others who remain federated will see their interactions, but you or any other server who defederates them won’t.

Yeah, my understanding is that defederation prevents any incoming communication, so you won’t see any posts or comments that come from lemmy.bullshit, however users from lemmy.bullshit will still see all of your comments and posts from lemmy.world unless they choose to defederate you back.

Now, this is odd. Perhaps it’s a bug in Lemmy? I’m reading this post on kbin (here’s the link to it on kbin.social, you can look without an account) and @Some_Emo_Chick’s original post has the link just fine, it’s the header link as you’d expect. If I go over to lemmy.world and view the same post, the header link instead points to a webp thumbnail from the article, hosted on lemmy.world itself. This seems to mean that the correct link was posted, since it’s what we got on kbin, but Lemmy fumbled somewhere and replaced it with the thumbnail.

Does EarthBound count? It’s sort of a sci-fi fantasy story which mostly takes place in a contemporary western setting (most of the game occurs in Eagleland, America filtered via Japan). There’s ancient evils, pay phones, psychic powers, a cafe, a bunch of zombies and a multi-level mall. Not all of the game is urban, with suburban, rural, swamp and alien areas, but there’s several cities to explore.