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.
Here’s the graph, as posted by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:
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.
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.
Yeah, the front page is working just fine, what’s not as good is going to a specific community for a subject you’re interested in which currently has 1-3 posts and zero replies.
The linked page specifically tracks Lemmy, although it’s not clear to me whether it’s tracking posts by users from Lemmy instances or posts to Lemmy instances, which is a medium-sized distinction (the latter would include kbin, Mastodon and other Fediverse users who are posting to Lemmy from their home instance, while the former would obviously include only Lemmy users).
It’s a bit self-serving of me to phrase it this way, but I do think the Reddit debacle shaved off a disproportionately not-terrible segment of the Reddit userbase. I think you could make your comment about Redditors instead and it would still be fair. There’s obviously a lot of Twitter users we don’t want here, but if we got the top 0.1% of Twitter users by quality? That’s not bad.
Time for somebody to make an EU-exclusive Mastodon instance called realthreads.legit and put it up on app stores. The real way to grow the fediverse in a hurry is to trick people into it. /s
Definitely agree, I’m not personally offended when, e.g. Americans use words that I wouldn’t use because they carry different meanings here. The only thing is that not everyone is a word nerd who follows the shifting meanings of words in different areas. While some people will find certain words offensive no matter what, I think the bulk of the offense is from people who don’t know either where you’re from or that the meaning and intent are different there, so I think it’s worthwhile for both sides to learn those differences.
@MilkToastGhost As long as we’re YSKing, just want to let you know that the word “spaz”/“spastic” has a complicated history. While its meaning has drifted heavily in the US, in the UK especially it remains closely associated with the disability cerebral palsy, and is considered highly offensive to many. The relative innocuousness of the US version has led to it being used in pop culture (e.g. songs by Beyonce and Lizzo, and also Mario Party 8 for Wii), which in turn has resulted in recalls and edits when they were released in the UK to some offense.
I’m not the word police, you can say whatever you want, but it’s handy to know when you’re speaking to a global audience how your words might be interpreted.
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.