Yeah this is one of Gargron’s several annoying WONTFIX choices. Refusing to make the post length limit configurable in any way besides setting an environment variable in the config files is another one - if you’re using a Mastodon-As-A-Service place like masto.host, this means it’s completely uneditable. There’s a major bugfix update on the way today and I am taking this opportunity to finally move to a fork that adds Markdown and local-only posts and a few other chronic WONTFIXes.
There is a lot of discussion as to whether the Fediverse should let Threads in, some admins say no, some admins also say no, and go on to say that we should also defederate from any other instances that do federate with Threads, on the general principle that Facebook is a catastrophically bad actor who has a lengthy history of strip-mining the social graph for profit. The only people I see popping up on the #mastoadmin tag who say “yes we should embrace Threads” are inevitably using icons that are photos of white dudes, and tend to have joined this year, as opposed to the cartoon characters and abstract color fields who have been running most of the Fediverse for multiple years.
It’s Meta. Aka Facebook. For that reason alone I wouldn’t touch this product with my least important personal information. I’ll follow the lead of the EU on this one.
Moving the account (and followers) off of Zuck’s ActivityPub-enabled platform to Mastodon or another ActivityPub-enabled platform isn’t going to happen. Threads is just another Facebook roach motel.
My sense is that most Mastodon admins/mods will wait to defederate until it (inevitably, IMO) becomes evident that Threads will tolerate the kind of comments and users banned by their instances. Whether Mastodon instances that continue to federate with with Threads despite that its (likely) lack of moderation and Nazi-friendliness should also be banned will likely shake out differently and get assessed on a case-by-case basis.
It launched in the UK, which suggests Meta is betting the post-Brexit review of the GDPR compliant Data Protection Act 2018 will ran towards the American ‘anything goes’ model of personal data protection and allow them to keep strip-mining peoples’ souls for profit.
Right at the top of the Techbro Rules of Acquisition:
Once you get their data, never give it back.
Meta, Twiiter, Reddit, all of them, act like Smaug on his hoard, even with user-contributed content. That’s not going to play well with a distributed federation.
Rapidly starting to suspect it won’t be long before I have no social media presence at all. I figure it won’t be long before Twitter either shuts down or kicks me out for antagonizing Nazis. Facebook seems to want me gone, too. (I try to avoid using the words “kill” or “beat” because Facebook yells at me every time, regardless of context.) Mastodon is needlessly complicated, Spoutible is run by techbro creeps, Bluesky is too closely associated by Nazi-friendly Jack Dorsey, and Threads is going to be a privacy shitshow (and probably every other kind of shitshow).
I like Instagram, because I like taking photos. I like Tumblr, because I like corny stuff. This feels like too little contact with the rest of the online world, honestly.
You do you, but one of the reasons so many Nazis go there is because they love getting in online fights with progressives.
From a profitability point of view a user who shows up to blow raspberries at fascists is at least as valuable to Twitter as a user who shows up to support fascists.
I generally mute and block everyone from Trumpers to Nazis to Gamergaters to Zach Snyder superfans, but I also quote-tweet posts about the various Nazi-types, often with anti-Nazi slogans. And sometimes, some random Mom for Liberty will report me for WrongThink.
I wonder what’s up with that. Most social networks will at least claim to follow European regulations with a straight face. Are they planning anything worse than usual or do they hope for a massive outcry because we miss out on the Twitter replacement of the week?
I suspect it’s more logistical than anything. They don’t have their ducks in a row yet on the UI for Europe and wanted to launch ASAP to take advantage of Twitter chaos.
GDPR is a nice idea and I know the Europeans are very excited about it, but I worked in mobile game development when it was implemented and it didn’t really change anything. Free mobile games are real bad spyware (don’t install them) but all we had to do was put a little banner at the bottom of the screen at launch saying we’re collecting your data and if you don’t consent, quit the game. It was nothing to be “GDPR compliant”. Sorry Europeans, but it really isn’t doing that much to fix the problem.
