Has. Autocorrect fail :)

I got an Amiga 500 in 1989 and adored it for a good ten years.

5 years ago I donated it. To a (computer) museum. That made me feel old.

Revanced app had the superior UI/UX.

Not because if taste, but because it is the YouTube UI that then allows you to add and remove stuff from the UI, getting away from all the user-hostile stuff. If you want to.

The mainstream ARE the crazies now, though. The outliers, and only some of the outliers, are sensible, smart people.

I did with my S10+, so you definitely could more recently.

Having said that I’m finding the crud much reduced on my S23, like they don’t try to push bixby down your throat every 10 seconds.

I think you didn’t understand my comment. " thousands of lemmy users being drowned out by millions of Threads users, who are a different demographic, have different goals for the platform" specifically.

This is not the case in places outside the US.

Not sure elon could afford the cloud bills if mrbeast actually did that

I agree with all of this.

As you said, “if it is problematic for a day or two”. It could be enormously problematic.

You fail to understand the benefit, and I don’t need to convince you, it’s still correct :)

Up to 70 million as of a day ago https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-07/meta-s-threads-has-70-million-signups-surprising-zuckerberg

I’m not concerned how many of these are real users - all the shills, the bots, are even worse than real users as they will just be spewing their propaganda around as much as possible.

Adding ONE million users overnight to the fediverse would be disruptive enough, 10x the biggest day from the influx from reddit. We’re looking at orders of magnitude more than that.

I disagree entirely, that’s simply incorrect. You can observe whether it is a cesspool or not whether you federate or not. The federation will not affect it at all. Everyone is able to go and use Threads, we won’t need to rely on “random screenshots or hearsay”, or to federate in order to see whether it’s good or not.

It’s an unknown quantity, 1000x bigger than the current fediverse. If we federate then block, there is just a mess to clean up. And you know the first few days are going to be a nightmare anyway, as they are with any social media platform, while the controls spin up and new ways to abuse them are found.

The benefit to doing it early is to let it land and let the smoke clear before making a judgement, without creating a mess for existing users. This is really obvious.

I don’t agree with this notion of “facebook content” vs “fediverse” content or anything like that. Content is just content, it’s links, it’s media, whatever. It’s not “facebook shit” any more than reddit shit or lemmy shit. Content is a by-product of the users, so who/what the userbase is is extremely important - and that is why how it is marketed, who it appeals to and so forth, and the relative scale. thousands of lemmy users being drowned out by millions of Threads users, who are a different demographic, have different goals for the platform, and so forth, is the real issue.

You acknowledge that you have moved on from platforms when facebook/meta have got involved, and you’re welcome to take your decisions on this, but it runs into problems in a federated environment where the goal is to increase interoperability by default.

Don’t get me wrong, I think our goals are the same, to have an environment where people can talk and share links that is relatively exclusive / for like-minded people. I just don’t think the angle of facebook/not facebook is the right one (tbh I would go further - I would not integrate, but not because of the provenance/company, but because of the users’ expectations coming over from Threads)

Given the relative scales, it’s best to put protection in place, then wait and see.

If Threads is a positive place, we open up and nothing is lost.

If Threads is a(nother) cesspit of hate and bots, then we have protected ourselves from it.

It’s not about Zuckerberg, it’s about the userbase. With something that grew to 30 million users literally overnight, it’s impossible to determine what it will be like, and how it will mesh with the existing fediverse content/users.

With something this scale, it only makes sense to secure and observe - pre-emptively block, watch the content, maybe even poll the users on what should be done. There is nothing to be lost this way, it’s only a cautious approach towards a potential later link.

What could be lost is the Threads community overwhelms the lemmy community before there is a chance to react (it is 1000x bigger, after all). It makes sense to be cautious, here.

This isn’t inconveniencing anyone, any user can make an account on Threads as well and use both right now.

Honestly, after literally over 30 years on the internet, I can safely say that this idea of bringing everyone together into one space, that will make both the space and the people better, does not work. Even back in the 90s it affected the signal to noise ratio badly. Now there are significant sets of bad actors, shitposting/meta and general noisy ignorance and hate that can easily, easily drown out any decent signal. It’s like a permanent Eternal September.

Think of this like the subject of tolerance - typically criticised that as a philosophy, in that it would thus tolerate the very things that would undermine and destroy it. Rather, it is not a philosophy, but a social contract - if you don’t use tolerance yourself, others are not bound to be tolerant of you. Of course, I’m not talking about being tolerant/intolerant here, but using the quality of engagement and participation in a community, as a barometer for whether that user should be engaged in that community.

Some barriers to entry are self-selection for appropriate users, and therefore a good thing - whether through obscurity, level of engagement, education or whatever. Without these, everything gets overrun and crushed. We haven’t yet found a good self-moderating system for online communities that provides everyone with a positive and fulfilling experience.

Threads can be Threads. The fediverse can be the fediverse. No-one is forced to choose just one, and trying to force them together is going to crush the fediverse. Lemmy has about 20,000 active users. Threads got 30 million signups in 24 hours.