Meta’s arrival in the open social web, also known as fediverse, is confusing. Does Facebook Owner See Open Protocols as the Future? Will it embrace the fediverse and then shut it down, driving people back to its proprietary platforms and decimating the startups building in the space? Will he expand his advertising empire to the fediverse, where today clients like Mastodon and others remain ad-free?
One possible answer can be gleaned from a conversation between two Meta employees working on Threads and Flipboard CEO Mike McCue, whose company joined the fediverse with its support of ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon and others.
On McCue’s “Flipboard Dot Social” podcast, he spoke with two leaders building the Threads experience, director of product management Rachel Lambert and software engineer Peter Cottle. McCue raised questions and concerns shared by others working on fediverse projects, including what Meta’s involvement means for that space and whether Meta would eventually abandon Threads and the fediverse, leaving a destroyed ecosystem in its wake .
Lambert responded by pointing out that Meta has other open source efforts underway, so “pulling the rug out from under” its fediverse work would come at a “very high cost” to the company, as it would harm Meta’s work. trying to build trust with other open source communities.
For example, the company releases some of its work on large language models (LLM) as open source products, like Llama.
Additionally, she believes Meta will be able to continue building trust over time with those working in the fediverse by releasing features and hitting milestones, as was the case recently with the launch of the new toggle that allows Threads users to post their messages to the site. a larger fediverse, where they can be viewed on Mastodon and other apps.
But more importantly, McCue (and all of us) wanted to know: why is Meta involved with the fediverse to begin with?
Meta now has 3.24 billion people using its social apps daily, according to its first quarter 2024 results. Does it really need a few million more?
Lambert answered this question indirectly, by explaining the use case for Threads as a place for real-time public conversation. She suggested that connecting to fediverse would help users find a wider audience than they could reach on Threads alone.
However, this is only true to a certain extent. While the fediverse is active and growing, Threads is already a dominant application in the space. Outside of Threads’ 150 million monthly active users, the broader threads universe has just north of 10 million users. Mastodon, one of the leading federated apps, fell below 1 million monthly active users after the launch of Threads.
So if Threads joining the fediverse isn’t about dramatically expanding the reach of creators, then what is Meta’s goal?
Remarks from Meta employees hinted at a broader reason behind Meta’s move to fediverse.
Bringing the Creator Economy to the Open Social Web
Image credits: Meta
Lambert suggests that by joining the fediverse, creators on Threads have the opportunity to “own their audience in a way that they can’t own on other apps today.”
But it’s not just about account portability, it’s also about creators and their revenue streams potentially leaving Meta’s walled garden. If creators wanted to leave Meta for other social apps where they had more direct relationships with fans, there are still few significant options outside of TikTok and YouTube.
If these creators joined the fediverse – perhaps to escape Meta’s grip on their livelihoods – Threads users would still benefit from their content. (Clue “Hotel California”).
Later in the podcast, Cottle explains how this could also play out on a protocol level, if creators offered their subscribers the option to pay to access their content.
“You could potentially imagine an extension of the protocol, saying, ‘I want to support micropayments’ or… ‘Hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-tag or register yourself. That would be great,” Cottle noted casually. Whether or not Meta will find a way to get a cut of these micropayments remains to be seen.
McCue brought up the idea that fediverse users could become creators where some of their content would become available only to subscribers, similar to how Patreon works. For example, fediverse advocate and ActivityPub co-publisher Evan Prodromou created a paid Mastodon account (@evanplus@prodromou.pub) that users could subscribe to for $5 a month to access. If he agrees with paid content, others will surely follow. Cottle agreed that the model could also work with the fediverse.
He also suggested that there are ways for the fediverse to monetize beyond donations, which often fuels various efforts today, like Mastodon. Cottle said someone could even create a fediverse experience that consumers would pay for, the same way some fediverse client apps are paid for today.
“Servers are not free to operate. And ultimately, someone will have to find a way to… bear the costs of the business,” he stressed. Could Meta consider a paid federated experience, like the one launched by Medium?
Protocol-level moderation services
The podcast gave another possible answer for what Meta could be working on in the space, with a suggestion that he could bring his moderation expertise to the ActivityPub protocol.
“A lot of the tools we have to make people feel safe and personalize their experience are pretty rudimentary today. So you can block users… you can do a global block at the server level, which is a very important action, but you’re kind of missing other tools that are a little bit more like a proportional response,” explained Lambert.
Today, fediverse users cannot do things like filter their followers or replies for offensive content or behavior. “It would be great for us to further develop a standard at the protocol level,” she added.
Still, Lambert said that whatever work Meta does, he wouldn’t expect everyone in the fediverse to adopt their own toolkit.
Image credits: Automatic
“We’ve built our technology around a set of policies, and our policies are informed by many different inputs from civil rights groups, political actors, and just our company values in general. So we certainly wouldn’t want to assume that this is now the norm within the fediverse when it comes to moderation, but making these tools more available so that people have that option seems like a really compelling path forward from our perspective.
Meta’s plan also closely resembles Bluesky’s idea around stackable moderation services, where third parties can offer moderation services on top of Bluesky, either as independent projects of individuals or communities, or even under form of paid subscription products.
Perhaps Meta also envisions a future in which its existing moderation capabilities become a subscription revenue product on the broader open social web.
Finally, Lambert described a fediverse user experience where you can more easily follow conversations happening around a post across multiple servers.
“I think in combination with the tools that allow you to personalize that experience, it will help people feel more secure and in control,” she said.
techcrunch
