Threads on Mastodon and the bright future of the Fediverse | Hacker News Reader

Threads on Mastodon and the bright future of the Fediverse

augment.ink

139 pointshn198642 comments

Thanks for investigating the threads federation. With reddit and twitter charging large fees for api access it has felt like one chapter of the web was closing. Now with the federation of threads there are even more people to interact with via a medium we have control over.

I'm glad to see someone find value in the open api nature of mastodon(and others). Thank you mastodon and ActivityPub for exposing the internet tubes.

I'm also really optimistic about the federation of Threads.

Too many organizations and people were (and still are) using Twitter as a canonical RSS alternative, which we've now painfully learned it decidedly isn't. Any option that makes their posts accessible using open protocols is a win in my view.

What's disappointing is the in my view extreme reaction of part of the Fediverse to Threads adopting Activitypub (I have no sense on whether that's a loud minority or general consensus). I get the embrace-extend-extinguish concerns, but there almost seems to be some desire to want to keep Mastodon small and fragmented for various reasons.

The same applies to the planned (and heavily criticized) Bluesky-Mastodon bridge: I'd love to be able to have a single place to follow both using a single app and (importantly) using a single handle, and I'm afraid that without, neither protocol will gain critical mass since they're just too similar to be worth replicating every post and keep following people on both.

>I get the embrace-extend-extinguish concerns, but there almost seems to be some desire to want to keep Mastodon small and fragmented for various reasons.

Much of the culture on Mastodon is anti-capitalist or created by marginalized communities that explicitly fled the mainstream web due to its toxicity and commercialism. They now see a Meta owned corporate behemoth showing up to assimilate them and flood them with all of the garbage they tried to escape.

It's very similar to the fear a lot of Hacker News users have about "turning into Reddit," of cultural contamination and Eternal September. It isn't entirely fair but it is understandable.

> I'd love to be able to have a single place to follow both using a single app and (importantly) using a single handle

For Mastodon, the only solution in this regard seems to be to host a single-user instance, which you can find inexpensive hosts for. Then follow whomever you want, block whomever you want, and add a couple of relays. I agree that identity management is one of the biggest flaws in the protocol.

Then again, centralized identity increases the possibility of tracking, harassment and centralized control over platforms so it can be seen as a feature and a bug. I kind of like Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project[0] conceptually, but I don't know what implementations are out there, if any. It would be nice to just host a data file somewhere, maybe with a pgp key, and be able to use that as an identity across implementations.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...

If Fediversians do not want to interact with people on Threads, they can just ban/block threads.net, no? Why would they not want people to use Activitypub as intended?

I suppose so, but as somebody that just wants to follow a couple of people/organizations I care about and only post every once in a blue moon, this has somewhat discouraged me from treating any given Mastodon server as a stable place to do that.

If I pick the wrong server, it seems like I might become a bargaining chip in some defederation drama any day, not being able to follow or be followed by who I choose (because they happen to be on an "evil" server), and potentially losing my follows and posts because I can't even migrate profiles to "evil" servers after defederation.

Meanwhile, self-hosting Mastodon seems like a hassle, and due to how Activitypub works would also make it somewhat tricky to bootstrap a list of people to follow, since discovery and search are non-global.

Bluesky seems to have solved that better, but can't currently federate with Activitypub servers, so it is yet another island for now.

You're assuming that all interactions are equal and calm and it takes little time to organize your comms; It's wrong.

If I am a trans person, my content will be shared with a company that has demonstrated it doesn't care about harassment, about racism, about large campaigns of hate that end in genocides. Meta doesn't care. Its accounts will see all I do, and will easily harass me. No, it is not possible to block them one by one, it doesn't scale. The only thing that starts to work is to block the whole instance because morons tend to congregate to the same instances (that's how the group effect works best). But even that is not enough because then other instances have access, and other people in my circle haven't blocked the instance so can also be targets, and it never ends.

In short: federation works if each island moderates its people. Meta demonstrably doesn't so it's not going to be a good citizen of the fediverse.

That's more an argument against sharing anything online, because people will always be able to gather info and share it out of band if they are determined. At least the Fediverse has some tools to automate over and commercial social network.

Yes, and that is where self-controlled tools change things. Instead of hoping some third-party for-profit tool who continouously demonstrated they will not take care of oppressed populations, we have the possibility to make what we want, not accept the status quo, secure ourselves. And now people want us to blindly connect to those who are funneling hate in the name of "connectivity". It only shows how individualistic and privileged those people are: as long as something doesn't affect them they don't even see that there is a problem. Not totally new coming from SV white males, but still always the same.

It's so frustrating that Meta is doing this with Threads while completely walling off Instagram. It's had a login wall that is far worse than X's for as long as I can remember.

Perhaps this openness in Threads is a temporary strategy while they grow their user base, and if/when they have a dominant market position they'll just close up shop again and rug pull the third party integration.

If you use Mastodon, I'd really urge you to try Phanpy. It's not just a great Mastodon client - it has a few genuinely innovative interaction patterns that work really well.

Really hard to believe that it's pretty much made by one person, given how polished and full-featured it is: https://mastodon.social/@cheeaun

https://phanpy.social/

Phanpy is extraordinary, and my main client. Unfortunately, it pushes mobile browsers to the limit. The scroll performance in Firefox for Android is abysmal, and deep threads can make Chrome choke on rendering. Despite all that, I keep using it for lack of better alternative.

Odd, it works really smoothly for me, on Firefox for Android as well. Which is not to discount your experience, but just to emphasise that people will probably have to try for themselves to see what it'll be like on their device.

Did you try on both Firefox and another chromium-based browser to compare? If it works similarly for you, I might take more time to investigate why it's janky here.

Edit: I tested with nightly (so a new profile), and performance is similar: lower on Firefox than Chrome, even on already-loaded content. I don't think it was fair to call Firefox's performance "abysmal", but this is definitely not 60fps scrolling; but then I have no idea how to measure that.

I did not (and it's a bit too much of a hassle given the lack of password manager and having to mess with OTP codes to try it now), but it feels basically instant, especially in normal use (e.g. just scrolling from post to post). So even if it were even faster in a Chromium-based browser, I really don't think yours is as fast as mine - you wouldn't be calling it janky, and it wouldn't be a hurdle to use it. I think you're just unlucky, e.g. with the combination of Firefox+your device?

I have a suspicion that this is due to the blur backdrop effect. I wish that many website have an option to turn this off. It doesn't have any benefits other than aesthetic.

I hadn't read this far so went ahead and used it on Safari for iPadOS. Performed, scrolled, threaded, etc. smoothly enough I forgot it was a web page.

After the loss of Tweetdeck, which made Twitter/X quite useless for me, I switched over to https://mastodeck.com/.

It works quite well for me.

I have found the official Mastodon client for iPadOS to be generally OK. What would I get using a web client like Phanpy? Thanks in advance for the information.

Well, since it's a web client, it's pretty easy to just try it out, but the benefit of Phanpy is not that it's a web client. It's just it has a lot of nice little UI touches that make it very pleasant to use. There's an overview at [1], but I'm not sure if that does it justice - you kind of have to experience it. The most noticeable is that all boosts are grouped in a horizontal carousel, whereas you vertically scroll through other posts, but I can't quite explain why that's no nice.

[1] https://github.com/cheeaun/phanpy?tab=readme-ov-file#design-...

> What would I get using a web client like Phanpy?

You can use it in a browser.

The amount of irrelevant gifs in this article is too damn high.

Animated, too. Distractions.

Yep. Soon as I saw the second one, I bailed.

If you like Phanpy (it's pretty awesome), feel free to try out a fork of it I'm working on called Agora: https://agorasocial.app

It's got a few additions/modifications:

- You can log in to a Mastodon, Bluesky, or Nostr account on Agora and it'll pull in your following/followers list from that account, while still allowing you to view/interact with posts from the other 2 protocols using bridges behind the scenes.

- "For You" tab that uses the open source FediAlgo library to discover interesting posts you haven't seen, based on which accounts you and your follows interact with.

- Search page also has a "suggested friends" feature that integrates the open source FollowGraph library. It looks up all the people you follow, and then the people they follow. Then it sorts them by the number of mutuals, or otherwise by how popular those accounts are.

- Integrated bridges into the search, so that if you search for a Bluesky handle like aoc.bsky.social or a nostr users hex code, it'll automatically know to use the relevant bridge for those protocols and find the bridged profile.

- When you follow a hashtag like #linux, it'll automatically follow the corresponding Lemmy community for that topic in your feed.

- Automatically loads your instance's version of a post so that you can like/boost/comment on it without having to think about what instance it's on.

> If you like Phanpy

I do.

> feel free to try out a fork of it I'm working on called Agora

I did but it was unable to pull posts from my Akkoma instance (where Phanpy works perfectly.)

Pro tip: Phanpy has a crackerjack conversation/thread view which works even if you're not logged in.

`https://phanpy.social/#/$link_to_mastodon_post?view=full`

Example:

- Original: https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/112252137266020755

- Phanpy convo/thread view: https://phanpy.social/#/https://sauropods.win/@futurebird/11...

"Firstly, the app always defaults to the For You feed."

This is, presumably, what Facebook wants to show you, now on Mastodon. Is that correct? That seems to have negative value for Mastodon users.

This part is about the Threads app. They do want to show you the 'For You' feed, but on Threads. Mastodon users aren't affected at all.

It's negative value for Mastodon users regardless: Facebook presumably wants to primarily show you content from Threads.

They want to be able to control-direct the narratives that people see - where if they can't fully control it, as part of the censorship-suppression-narrative control apparatus Facebook is party to toeing the line for - they will try to get ahead of the wave and inject what they can.

If you know you're beginning to lose control then having people use the "wild west" that is more disordered makes it easier to flood to prevent truths from surfacing as easily or in as high of a concentration, being able to add noise vs. people learning to associate with and use more truth-seeking systems - something like Community Notes being a good start for this.

Ooh, I hadn't heard of Phanpy and I'm sold.

Panphy looks excellent! It wasn't on my radar yet, thanks for sharing!

For a bright future, I don’t see much adoption outside of tech people.

Also, Mastodon is an awful name. Twitter sounds goofy but at least it’s friendly. Mastodon is too bookish, doesn’t really resonate with cool.

I am launching a beta mastodon discovery tool at utoots.com. Still lots of rough edges but gotta kick it out of the nest at some point!

I am not much of a frontend developer or UI expert, but hopefully folks find it fun and usable. I had a ball working on it over the past 4 months!

Please check it out and let me know what you think.

Threads on Mastodon, but...

> 1. Threads users can't reply to Mastodon comments or see them in Threads. > 2. Threads users can be followed by Mastodon accounts but they will not be notified nor can they follow back. > 3. Likes from Mastodon are not counted toward your Threads like count

...it's not Masterdon on Threads.

Once they left xmpp. What these companies can't compete they just put their work onto them and suck up whatever and users and then move on. Well no longer interested to see bloody adds on mastodon those who create my profiles. Facebook shall cease to exist ,

Reply on news.ycombinator.com