Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (Repeat)

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I’ve written on here before about Threads and how:

• I think it’s totally fine for people to join if they’re too bamboozled by the process of a picking an instance on Mastodon, or some other piece of ActivityPub software (even though I still can’t really fathom just exactly how it seems hard to some).
• The southern division of public policy has a Project 2025 author on its team, and Meta has yet to even remotely acknowledge this to the public. Just exactly how much influence this living turd has on Threads is questionable. For all I know it could only be Facebook (judging by the way Facebook looks nowadays).
• It’s algorithm is like a drunk person having mood swings, in that, if you even so much as slightly interact with a topic, that’s the only thing you see for the entire next day.
• And that there are groups of instances on the Fediverse extremely dedicated to not only blocking federation from Threads themselves, but essentially utilizing peer pressure as a weapon in order to get others to do so, as well.

On that last point, though, I’ve spoken about the little “black list” built by veganism.social that basically lists every federated server they can see, and whether or not they’re blocking Threads (again, peer pressure, and I wish people would stop acting like we’re all mentally still in high school). I find things like this distasteful. Have your opinion, your feelings, and what you think is right, and stop forcing it onto other people, unless of course we’re talking discrimination, hate crimes, or what-have-you … I mean, obviously, you should make sure people know those things are bad.

But Threads?

Right now I’m seeing it as kind of a gray area.

There are people on there I haven’t seen in years, that I was originally following on Twitter. Tons of LGBTQ+ people, and other people I wouldn’t ever call “bad”. And then, you know, the trolls, weirdos, and one-off accounts, and oh yeah, also, the spam accounts intentionally setup to grift engagement.

That’s not what I’m writing this post about, today, though.

Today it’s about the ethos of “embrace, extend, extinguish” that all started with Google and XMPP. Basically, Google integrated its instant messaging protocol with XMPP, and then decided, like they do with every project that isn’t an immediate groundbreaking successful thing, and backed out. The problem with this, is that Google’s integration was highly anticipated, and this drew a lot more people to XMPP, and then this also essentially “killed it.” I don’t really know if you can say it’s dead, though, because I literally can see people linking to their own usernames for XMPP on their Mastodon profiles, right now, as I’m typing this.

The fear revolving around Threads and federation with ActivityPub, is … uhm, that people might get too excited about this, and everyone might federate with Threads, and then Threads might pull out and extinguish interest in ActivityPub. That, and Meta isn’t so great at moderating Threads. But … I don’t really see how that’s a problem for Mastodon, when as admins and moderators, you can manually silence bad accounts, and you should, regardless of where they’re coming from. An interesting thing I’ve seen on Wafrn, though, is that the federated Tumblr alternative makes federating with Threads an account-level, opt-in, and I think that’s actually really genius. The decision should absolutely be in the hands of the user.

But I have some opinions on XMPP and its eventual perceived crash, and whether Meta is copy/pasting what Google did here.

First of all, as much as I loved Aol Instant Messenger, and instant messaging in the nineties … it’s dead, guys. I don’t know about you, or anyone else, but I can hardly find enough interest in Discord and my Steam friends list to keep up with them enough to actively talk to people for long periods of time. I … kind of just use social media for that. You know, that thing that started with Myspace and only became bigger until it ruled our entire lives?

Nowadays, I kind of don’t really like anyone outside of my family having immediate access to me. I’m reclusive, and I’m battling things in my head that make it hard for me to break out of my own shell, and you think I’m going to go out of my way to actively talk to a bunch of people instantly and all of the time.

Nuh uh.

You see, I mean, sure, Google deciding to graveyard federation with XMPP likely harmed it, even if just a little bit. But I think the overarching problem here is just that, instant messaging isn’t really the thing nowadays, and I think it’s always kind of been on the way out.

Social media, micro-blogging, you think that’d go away on the fediverse on the off-chance that Meta kills Threads, or pulls out of ActivityPub?

AP’s been around since the early 2000s, and yeah, sure, it has this reputation of being a Linux-user’s heaven, and full of dudes who hate people who make things (like music, art, etc), but I don’t think it’s ever going anywhere. At this point, Twitter is basically the only major platform that isn’t federated, or touting decentralization, and it’s dying.

But even in the off-chance that Meta does a select-all and delete on its ActivityPub integration, I think apps like Mastodon would definitely still be standing. Because, as of writing this, plenty of people aren’t even federating with Threads, and most of the people I see and interact with on the fediverse value a user-owned social network more than anything else on the web. Whether Threads is there or not, for many, is purely inconsequential in the grander scheme of things. And a lot of users on Threads don’t even know what the hell Mastodon even is.

Post by @thebrianpenny

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I don’t think I have to, but I just want to point out real quick that Mastodon is not a company, and ActivityPub, or, “the fediverse”, as stated before, has existed for decades. That the Bluesky devs suddenly, just two days ago, decided to call the network of keys accessing their servers “the atmosphere” is more or less just another way I feel they’re kind of cherry-picking ideas from a concept that has existed well before they decided they wanted to be Twitter 2.0.

We talk about Bluesky getting users, but Bluesky is part of an open social internet called "The Atmosphere" where other people can make their own apps, including their own versions of Bluesky. Bluesky isn't growing; the Atmosphere is! You're not "our" users; you're a part of a shared place.

— Paul Frazee (@pfrazee.com) Aug 31, 2024 at 8:43 PM

But anyway .. embrace, extend, extinguish, or just fear-mongering, with some legit concerns about corporations, and their goals?

You decide, I suppose.

A lot of what I say about some of these networks might sound negative, or pessimistic, but I really do actually enjoy watching it all shift back and forth. I like that the internet is having a power-struggle to figure out where the “place to be” is now. Because none of them will win. The “place to be” is wherever you want, and it should’ve never been just one website, like I sad in my “blog day” post.