Robb. Knight.

I wanted to expand a bit on my Threads thread so instead of adding to the thread, I've written a blog post about Threads. Clear? Good.

The Mastodon blog has a good post about Threads and what it means for the fediverse in general:

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

I have no intention of using Threads, signing up was purely an academic exercise. I'm not even going to link to my profile but if you happen to find me, I'll be posting random emojis when I remember the app exists.

Threads shows me a load of crap from people I don’t follow.

I said "as expected" in my Mastodon post but I'm not sure I'd actually thought about this. Of course they were going to dump random stuff into the timeline. And of course this will include ads/promoted posts in the future. I wonder if they intend to inject ads into a persons timeline when they support ActivityPub so even if you follow from Mastodon you see ads (until I immediately unfollow them). We shall see.

The app does that awful refresh like Instagram does when you open the app, start reading something, then it’s gone, never to be seen again. CTD said they have muscle memory to favourite posts on Instagram when it opens just in case this happens? That is wild that people feel the need to do that just because the app sucks. Now we have two apps that suck like that.

Speaking of ActivityPub, they say it's coming, it's mentioned in help docs but I agree with Andy:

it either won’t happen at all, or won’t happen for a long time

I made a basic ActivityPub server a few weeks ago and while it doesn't implement everything that ActivityPub has to offer, it's close enough. I'm surprised a company the size of Meta, who has a huge team of engineers couldn't get this working for launch. To be clear I'm not saying "herp derp I did it why can't they" but still, I find it surprising. If we don't see it within a month, I think we might never see it.

Assuming they do release AP support, I am excited for that. Being able to follow people who will never join Mastodon sounds great. I don't want to use Threads (much like Bluesky) just to follow a handful of people. Here's hoping they do release it and that they don't inject ads into a user's posts.