Here’s everything we know about it so far:
- It will use ActivityPub.
- It will be a side app of Instagram.
- It will most likely be called Threads.
- Your Instagram verification status will transfer over.
- There will be easy discovery tools in place: Your Instagram followers will be able to follow you on Threads as well (they won’t transfer over automatically).
What do you think?
After reading this very thread, one thing is clear: People simply don’t trust Meta, for good reason.
But I’m still, perhaps naively, hopeful that this one could be the platform to pivot the decentralised social web approach to the masses.
Also, a funny scenario: What if you wait it out until enough people follow you on Threads, then take all your followers and transfer over to a Mastodon instance? I may do that, actually.
I’m right there hoping with you and I think this very well could be a big turning point as they’ll be the first major player, to my knowledge, to incorporate anything Fediverse into their ecosystem.
My other big hope is that the process of signing up for sites like Lemmy, Mastadon, and other Fediverse apps is improved so that more people can navigate it easily. As you said, right now the UX is pretty bad and can be frustrating even for veteran users of the internet. My biggest frustration, like many, when signing up for Mastadon was trying to choose a server and the way the Servers page is structured made it ten times more difficult I felt like because it’s just a giant list of servers that are sorted by category.
I think with a really great UX and simplified UI for the sign-up process that would go a long way to not turning people away. I imagine a literal walk through of the whole process, step by step, with lots of hand holding and tool-tips pointing to things in case someone gets confused.
I hear this a lot, but how do these people manage to find a doctor, or a car repair shop, or a garbage company,etc? It’s exactly as confusing or hard, which is to say not at all.
There’s no great easy hand holding for choosing a repair shop or doctor - you either look it up or go to the first one you find or a random one. Same works with the fediverse.
I agree with you fully that it’s not hard or difficult necessarily–I think it can just be frustrating for some users, even more web/tech-literate folks.
I just think improving the UX/UI in general and providing more explanation/resources especially to newer users would go a long way with encouraging elieving some of the frustrations. Easier said than done obviously!
There’s definitely a trust issue. ActivityHub doesn’t fundamentally change that unfortunately - Meta would still see everything I post or say, and can still build a profile on me if my posts are visible in their app. You bring up an interesting thought though - my understanding is that ActivityHub would make migration to other platforms easier… even migrations off first party apps, if a Digg/Reddit/Twitter-style event occurred? Might help prevent some of the tomfoolery we’re seeing now.
Or I’m also naive, I guess we’ll find out.
As far as I understand that’s correct. I’ve got a solid junior level understand of programming LOL but ActivityPub acts as an interface basically where instead of the content being walled off to Instagram specifically this new Threads app should be accessible by the outside world (Mastadon, Lemmy, whatever else) through ActivityPub. Those apps would get the content through requests to the interface. So you could theoretically migrate your content just like you can on other Fediverse apps.