The Fediverse is Meta’s get-out-of-jail-free card
Thursday was quite a day for Zuck. Within 24 hours of launch, Meta’s Twitter clone Threads had managed to persuade 50 million of its Instagram users to sign up to the new microblogging platform in one of the most spectacular growth stories of all time. The fact the the network managed to cope with the influx is probably even more impressive when you think that this was its first day and the thing just worked, all day.
It’s been so impressive, in fact, that many people have started wondering if Meta’s intention to join its app to the fediverse through the ActivityPub protocol will ever happen. After all, it was initially thought that the project was there to bolster user numbers by plugging into a pre-existing network, before we knew Meta were simply going to shift across social graphs from Instagram. Now that Threads has tens of millions of users within hours, what is the point of opening up that valuable network to third parties through ActivityPub? Wouldn’t it just be better to keep the doors closed and the party going inside rather than let the guests roam beyond the control of Meta’s social walled garden? Why continue the ActivityPub project at all when the total number of users across the fediverse is already a fraction of the Threads user base? What have they to gain?
It turn out, quite a lot.
The main problem of social media has for a long time been moderation. Controlling the trolls, bots and manipulators has been a thorn in the side of every social media platform out there as they try to find the right balance between free speech and protecting their users. Meta has a history of being terrible at it. Moderation is difficult and expensive and you can never get it right in a way that pleases everybody.
So with Threads, I think they have decided not to. By planning integration with ActivityPub they have found a way to avoid it entirely or at least reduce their own accountability.
They can make us do it.
Let’s take a look at Reddit as an example.
Reddit, despite its current issues, has found an amazing solution to the inordinate costs of moderation: they make the users do it. Each Subreddit has its own team of volunteers to keep the place in order. It is their unpaid duty to keep their Subreddit clear of abuse and misuse. If something goes wrong, it is the fault of the mods. All Reddit needs to do is find new ones from the community who already have an stake in the subreddit to keep it going.
As we have seen in the recent protests, giving over control of moderation to volunteers like this doesn’t really relinquish any control for the company. The protests organised by uncooperative mods have already been crushed. Protesting Subreddits have been coerced into switching back on and life continues on as before. The company retains full control over its product and needs to spend little of the time, effort, money and accountability needed to directly moderate the communities that have made it such a success.
It’s clever. And it’s what Meta can do with Threads and ActivityPub.
ActivityPub will allow Threads to federate with the fediverse. Users will be able to interact with posts from independently owned servers running systems like Mastodon. That means Meta can’t really be held responsible for what is held on those servers because it has no control over them. That’s handy for Zuck, but what if we take it a little further:
What if Meta allows Threads to federate with other versions of Threads? What if it allows us to set up different instances of Threads on Meta’s incredible server network ourselves? What if we didn’t just have threads.net (the current Threads instance, which forms a part of every users username), but we also had threads.music or threads.bojackhorseman or threads.catsinboxes? Different instances of threads for different interests, though they all federate nicely with each other in a unified feed. Meta could provide the servers for free in exchange for the ability to reap data and serve apps. And they ask us, the users, to act as the moderators — just like Reddit — taking responsibility for the mini-Threads communities we set up. Meta gets the data; they get the ads; they get the money; they retain ultimate control.
And they get almost none of the responsibility running the hardest part of social media: moderation.
They can even avoid the responsibilities of being a social monopoly because they are running a protocol that cooperates directly with competitors like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed and soon Tumblr. If you don’t like it, they can say, take your social graph and run.
Meta already the biggest hurdle for success in social media: the users. Now it just has to find a way to keep them all without having to be responsible for them.
