If the BlueSky protocol offers tangible benefits over ActivityPub, the BlueSky protocol could become the basis for ActivityPub 2.0. I don’t know much about the details, though.

Lemmy.world has kind of awful moderation, which means people who are trolls or bad actors have lived here for a very long time despite multiple reports.

Maybe people shouldn’t overflow the moderation pipe with reports then just because posts are idiotic. There’s the downvote button for that. I’m just a guy with a full-time job and personal life who on occasion may get ill with a cold or so. So when I log onto Lemmy on PC and I see a dozen of reports having popped up about posts being reported as being “in bad faith”, posts that may be genuinely idiotic but not containing any personal attacks / racism /…, I’m already checking out. Not every idiotic posts needs moderator intervention. Sometimes a minus 25 score is enough. So when there are a dozen of reports about merely idiotic posts, I might miss a genuinely intervention-worthy one.

the counterargument seems fairly strong.

Lemmy isn’t compatible with Threads.

so that if Threads were ever federated with, the sheer VOLUME of content would quickly overwhelm the ability of the mods to keep up.

No. Threads has no communities, Threads cannot post to Lemmy communities. That’s fearmongering.

if Threads were to join the Threadiverse

Threads is already part of the Fediverse but on a per-account basis. It’s compatible with Mastodon and other Twitter-likes that use ActivityPub. Lemmy can’t read Threads posts, just as Lemmy can’t read random Mastodon posts, only the ones Mastodon users explicitly posted into Lemmy communities.

Didn’t happen with MP3.

Someone re-parented a variation to prevent it being public domain until 2040.

So the variation cannot be used. That’s irrelevant for a file format. Some company could, for example, patent a more efficient encoding technique but the resulting file format is still public domain. So at worst an open source encoder would need to be slightly inefficient because it uses the traditional technique.

Someone will most likely patent hack it in order to reclaim it, then try to patent troll about it… Because corporate people are jerks.

How? If the tech is older than 25 years, it’s prior art no matter what. MP3 is fully free for the same reasons.

Even the launch version of HL1 was a great game but gosh, were Valve a crappy company back then. HL1 shipped with a bunch of trailers, so far, so good. But update patches contained mandatory new trailers. That was dialup era and downloading the updates cost much more money because of those stupid trailers. Then came Steam and made it worse. Imagine the pushback to ads in Windows 10 but add to the annoyance the fact that the annoyances also cost money. Broadband was still just getting started. My family certainly couldn’t afford it and they could even less so afford me being online on dialup all the time. So my more wealthy friend passed me CDs with the last non-Steam updates, mods like Counter Strike. Me having been a dumb kid would have ruined my family’s livelihood otherwise.

Outside the Apple world, a dock connector has been the norm way before USB C was invented.

It has a soft paywall.

I think the common practice is to link to the original in the URL bar and then use the body text to do paywall/loginwall removals.

Interest in hobbies related to commercial brands (following sports, movie franchises, etc.)

When you even mention that you’d like to follow brand accounts, people start shouting at you how commercial scum needs to be banned/defederated.

Of course people move to platforms where their interests are represented.

Let’s go with your idea of what the topic is for a second

Considering that I’ve replied to another person with my explanation and got very positive feedback, I certainly know better than you. You’re not the person I’ve replied to. You interjected and then tried to educate to me what my comments are about.

have you considered how advertisement posts could appear in search results, hashtags, or the explore section?

Any brand account on a regular Mastodon instance would be the very same.

Or what if they decide to screw with the normal process and artificially inflate the number of boosts and favorites for advertisement posts?

Mastodon doesn’t have an algorithmic timeline, so that would lead to absolutely nothing.

Also, Lemmy cannot interact with Threads anyway, so Lemmy servers defederating from Threads is completely pointless. Irrelevant to what I’m saying.

Relevant to the comment I’ve initially replied to.

What copyright? Threads users gave it away when they signed up.

Nope.

Your whole argument is predicated on the idea that a (personal) account on Threads is either owned by its creator, or is associated with a trademark.

No, I made several good arguments, you just moved goalposts and declared they don’t matter.

The topic is

No, that’s not the topic. The topic is ads being placed in the fediverse in a way only defederation could block. Even if Meta silently making posts in the name of my favorite organic orange juice advertising Coca-Cola was legal (it’s not), it would be easily solved by simply not following any Threads accounts. Also, Lemmy cannot interact with Threads anyway, so Lemmy servers defederating from Threads is completely pointless.

about them impersonating their own users and using that to push ads through federation.

No, that’s not legal. That would violate copyright, consumer protection, competition laws, and whatnot, at least in the USA and the EU. Mastodon users (!!) must be explicitly aware that a post is an ad, not the brands ticking off an EULA on Threads. Therefore Mastodon users could decide to follow a brand account were products are promoted (just as they can right now if that brand has a regular Mastodon page) but Threads cannot legally impersonate one account on Threads to advertise another account. That’s not a grey area.

I didn’t set a timer but it took me at most a single-digit number of minutes to find documents and announcements about the FTC tightening the rules about deceptive advertising several times throughout the years.

Threads has no influence on the terms of service on Mastodon. So no, Threads can’t allow to misrepresent profiles on Mastodon.

Why don’t you just cancel it now and use ad blockers?

Joel explains this in the second sentence: “I’m OK with it, especially considering that it supports creators more than ad viewers”

Xbox is locked down and barely has any security issues on user hardware.

Not a single Microsoft game runs natively an Windows ARM.

Threads had more users than the entire non-Threads fediverse within a day or two. Mastodon is not the competition.

That would be A) identity fraud because it would be my favorite fair trade drink endorsing Coca-Cola without the ads being clearly separated as required by many jurisdictions and B) not targeted advertising in any way.

Even if Threads posts illegally embedded extra ads: Users could just opt not to follow Threads accounts. Threads cannot just magically place ads in the feed. That’s impossible.

Ads already are posts, as I wrote but the main feed algorithm is not in their hand, it’s the local feed of mastodon.

If users aren’t permitted to follow brand accounts, they’re just being driven into the hands of BlueSky. Your attitude isn’t helping at all.

Still a bit worried about hashtags being used for ads

Coca-Cola could have an official profile on mastodon.social and use hashtags there as well. Whether corporations use hashtags or not in their “regular” Mastodon posts has nothing to do with Threads.

Also Mastodon has user-level features to restrict unwanted content to show up in your feed ranging from hiding boosts up to blocking the entire instance:

And since Lemmy cannot interact with Threads content at all, defederating Lemmy instances from Threads makes even less sense. One of the big Lemmy instances blocks Threads but doesn’t block CSAM instances. Insane priorities their admins have.