Press coverage of the Fediverse

(Reposting some stuff I posted on the crosspost source)

For as long as this article is, it is remarkably free of journalism. It is basically a press release from Meta saying that they're planning to implement Threads in a few months, and aren't announcing anything further at this time.

“Do we adapt the protocol to be able to support this?” Lambert asks. “Or do we try to do some kind of interesting, unique implementation?”

This is a fascinating question, both in its lack of an answer, and in the inherent framing of the question that of course they're going to introduce incompatibilities, and the discussion is simply about how to do it. I also like the use of the word "interesting."

Mastodon allows some artistic nudity

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Additionally, specifics are still murky regarding exactly how user data will be handled after the connections between networks are established. For example, if you federate a post from Threads and decide to delete it afterwards, what happens to the cached post on the servers of the other networks?

That... is not the central question that's on people minds about how user data will be handled. Presumably you were in a position to ask Rachel Lambert, the product manager at Meta who started the company's journey towards interoperability, a more obvious and salient question, and include in your article her response.

Meta is treading carefully, doing a phased implementation while continuing conversations with Fediverse leaders.

Who are these leaders and what are they saying about this? This, also, seems like it would have been pertinent information to include. If Meta's answer was "You're not allowed to know that," then including that response would have made the article quite a bit more illuminating than simply pretending it didn't occur to you to ask for any details.

Facebook is operated by a large corporation which assigns a famously low priority to the interests of its users, except insofar as they can be used to make money (which is of course Meta's right to do, more or less). Mastodon is operated by its users themselves and designed according to how they'd like it to operate. And yet, somehow, there are these issues and shortcomings originating on the Mastodon side that Meta will have to carefully monitor to shield its users from, and that's first and foremost on their mind throughout this entire rollout, and what they're chiefly invested in watching as it all happens.