I forget where now, but one of the most insightful characterisations of centralised social networks that I’ve encountered, is the idea that a few companies tricked everyone into hanging out at the mall. There’s arguably a flaw in the premise of the oft-quoted idea of a singular ‘digital town square for the world’, but if you were to picture a truly social space at that magnitude, it likely wouldn’t have billboards strewn throughout it. The conversations wouldn’t be monopolised by attention-seeking celebrities. And you certainly wouldn’t invite weirdly anthropomorphised incarnations of innumerable brands to join the party.
All of these things were normalised over years of Twitter & Instagram’s dominance of the social media sphere. Spaces that were ostensibly for people to share their experiences and have conversations, came to include — and arguably to be characterised by — the contributions of others who had alternative motives: commonly to garner attention, and/or to sell something. Instead of communication, these platforms became about broadcast.
After 24 hours playing with Meta’s new microblogging platform — Threads — I’m struck by the extent to which, for all the tsuris in the social media space of late, this established paradigm persists. The platform only has an algorithmically-generated Home feed at present1, and whilst this will likely change, it currently plays as a very open admission from Meta that this isn’t designed as a purely social platform. Like latter day Twitter before it — and like its visual-first sister platform, Instagram — Threads is already a place where, yes, you can share your experiences, and socialise with friends, but you do so whilst surrounded by people who eagerly want your attention and your money. This is the promise and the peril of the centralised platform: everyone’s here (but that includes the try-hard brands, and the thirsty celebrities). So, yes, it already feels a little icky, and the advertisers aren’t even there yet. But — as predicted — the new platform immediately allowed me to reconnected with some folks who never would have made their way to Mastodon. The colossal power of Instagram’s established social graph did its thing, and 48 million Threads accounts were activated in the first ~24 hours. By most estimates, that’s something like four times the size of every combined Mastodon instance, on day one!
Whether by design or circumstance, Threads’ much-lauded ActivityPub integration isn’t available at launch. At present it is very much a walled-garden proudly professing its ambitions of federation.2 But, overnight, it has become one of the largest entities committed to using the protocol3, and its eventual federation will have consequences for the ActivityPub ecosystem that I don’t think are entirely clear at present. In my experience, reception to the idea on Mastodon has been mixed. Some server admins have pledged to de-federate Threads as soon as it integrates with the protocol; others (including the admin of my server) have a more balanced view. There have been enough questions floating around, that Mastodon-founder / lead developer Eugen Rochko published some notes, seeking to allay fears about Meta’s ability to track Mastodon users, and push adverts to Mastodon servers etc. His conclusion is this:
We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.
Whilst there are many unknowns about how all this plays out, I think there’s a good chance that the advent of Threads will redound to the benefit of the social web writ large. Advocates of open protocols like ActivityPub should be optimistic about the arrival of a platform that is already clearly on a path to mass adoption. Whether it’s in weeks’ or months’ time, there will soon be millions more accounts available to follow, almost certainly including people whose posts you will be interested in, but whom would not otherwise have joined a compatible platform. But the best part is, you won’t need to step foot in the mall to follow them. Whatever the Threads experience ultimately becomes, thanks to ActivityPub integration, the option will exist to follow Threads accounts without having to engage with an algorithmically-generated Home feed full of brands and celebrities, without ever having to see an advert, and without giving the surveillance capitalism vampires any more of your data.
Personally, I intend to keep playing around with Threads for now. Likely as soon as it’s possible, however, I’ll switch to following Threads users via Mastodon. It will be interesting to see how easy or difficult Meta make it for Threads users to find and follow non-Threads sources publishing via ActivityPub. That barrier, whilst it’ll almost certainly be bidirectional, may well involve jumping through some cumbersome hoops not-so-subtly designed to keep people on Meta’s platform. I think I’ll be OK with that. If it leads to a kind of two-way mirror effect, where I can follow Threads users’ posts, but it’s harder for them to find mine… well, that’s arguably a win-win.
