I had written about it earlier when WordPress had announced an “interplay” with Mastodon. It was a stupid move. Mastodon’s “decentralisation” does nothing for individuals; rolling up your server infrastructure would be incredibly difficult and expensive.
It is true that companies want to “keep their independent voices” but the ongoing costs have also to be factored. What do they get from keeping a social media presence though? They are addressing only a tiny fraction of their overall user-space. It can boil down to “FOMO” or fear of missing out or claiming the space which otherwise would be copied/taken over. Yet, they inherently miss out the crucial element- content moderation at scale. This would eventually sap the most energetic “volunteer”. Look at what happened to Reddit- it has now become a wasteland.
Meta had “open sourced” its LLM model- Llama and I had completely missed out on its significance. They are now focused on ActivityPub protocol which underlies Mastodon.
This is an interesting take here:
Copy, Acquire, Kill— How Meta could pull off the most extraordinary pivot in tech history
Meta’s sudden interest in ActivityPub and Mastodon doesn’t make much sense. There are a few impossibly consistent talking points floating through the Fediverse. Each tries to explain away the oddity of Meta’s presence.
I don’t buy any of it. This is a plan years in the making. And we’re watching Meta’s biggest hurdle play out in real-time.
What if Meta’s hidden objective behind the Threads-to-Mastodon initiative is a play on app.net? And, what if threads.net is a measured step towards what could be the greatest pivot in all of tech?
There were numerous Twitter competitors earlier on; I don’t know how Twitter managed to get funding (and survive). It is despite the fact that app.net was a “developer first platform” with generous sharing of API’s. Perhaps Twitter ingrained itself as a “source of news” (which it wasn’t) and for celebrity bytes (which are often in poor taste).
This seems to be the plan:
Threads.net would market itself similarly but with a few key differences— interoperability, content ownership, and a revenue split program. These flagship features make the platform attractive to small developers and server admins.
Threads.net’s potential flagship features:
- Interoperability : All third-party apps are connected, or “federated”. Users can engage, follow, and migrate between apps easily.
- Content Ownership: Unlike app.net, third-party developers and users “own” their published data. Each third-party platform has a distinct URL where content lives.
- Ad revenue split: threads.net offers a turnkey ad delivery system. Qualifying third-party developers and admins can enroll in a revenue split program. If approved, they gain a dependable revenue stream.
An ad-revenue split would likely gain enthusiastic participation in the tech community. Most indie devs scrape by for years, and that’s if they’re lucky. The poor saps who receive VC funding get to watch their best feature copied on Instagram.
Exactly.
Meta would eventually embrace and poison the ecosystem.
RadOncNotes 