Threads Is Libra and Meta Again?
Mark Zuckerberg has known for years that he would like to spend more time in the crypto world. Meta’s new Twitter-like social media app Threads is its latest attempt to capitalize on the growing appeal of decentralization.
Zuck’s crypto envy first appeared with the failed Libra (Diem), a payment token. This became evident again when Zuckerberg, partly inspired by blockchain-based metaverse, decided to rebrand Facebook to Meta. Zuckerberg threw his entire fortune at a tipping point that was clearly doomed, and that’s the case now.
Zuck’s third attempt at the crypto-related fruit may be more successful than his first two attempts, although Threads, like many of Facebook’s other successes, is just a copycat of an existing product. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri said Threads will eventually use the ActivityPub protocol as a mastodon, although it’s not yet integrated. ActivityPub, part of the mainstream W3C, provides a standard protocol that allows social media services to offer “data portability,” something digital activists have been demanding for years.
AT Protocol, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter competitor and BlueSky’s experimental Twitter rival, may have had the greatest influence on Threads’ backend design. AT Protocol is BlueSky’s answer to ActivityPub. Dorsey has certainly been influenced in his own work by the decentralized social media movement that began around 2016 with the tokenized Steemit.
Nostr is also a decentralized social media standard that has recently gained popularity among Bitcoiners, including Dorsey. There is (was?) also DeSo. DeSo (formerly BitClout) is a tokenized blockchain-backed system that never saw widespread adoption.
The notion that threads are “decentralized” is a bit of an exaggeration. Backend decentralization doesn’t seem to stop Meta from doing what it loves: collecting data on users of its front-end Threads application. According to Meta’s App Store Disclosures on Threads, Meta collects all user data that Meta needs for its targeted ad model.
It is also instructive to note that Threads was not launched in Europe, probably because European data protection standards are higher than ours.
Meta (then Facebook), which developed Libra, had a similar setup with a decentralized backend and an app that collected data. Facebook claimed that the Libra protocol is decentralized, a claim that is debatable at best. Most users would have been directed to a wallet that collected data as intensively as Facebook.com.
In practice, it is not clear how “portable” or easily portable Threads data will be. Mastodon is another platform that uses the ActivityPub protocol. Critics have described it as clunky, unintuitive, and difficult to move off a server. Meta could, it seems, develop tools to make it easier for users to exit the Threads platform, but that doesn’t seem to be in their best financial interest. As a public company, Meta will not do anything that is not in its best financial interest.
One can also argue that threads are unlikely to become a home for “crypto-Twitter” discussions and personalities. This is because Meta has long had a reputation for being indifferent to privacy. A clever analysis revealed that Threads is a “hot and dumb” audience because it gets spillovers from Instagram.
Elon Musk is at the root of all of this. Musk’s disastrous takeover of Twitter has convinced a crucial majority of people that crypto dudes have been warning for years that any user-generated media platform that has a single control point (or, in Elon’s case , an outage) is bad for users in the long run.
I am personally experiencing this tragedy. Musk pulled the rug out from under me after spending more than a decade tweeting. The bad decisions have been relentless, from counterproductively bizarre rethinking of verification, to hostile abuse of trusted news sources, to blocking of certain external links.
Musk’s actions have prompted a noticeable exodus, culminating in the imposition of a view restriction last week. Even though the display limit was announced, it became a big problem for users. While we don’t have the exact numbers, over the last week many people have said goodbye and decided which platform they will use instead.
Meta picked the right moment to strike. According to The Verge, an unnamed meta executive informed employees, “We’ve heard from YouTubers and celebrities who are interested in a platform that’s run sensibly.” According to Mike Isaac, a reporter for the New York Times, internal sources claim that the launch of threads was sped up to capitalize on Musk’s view limit fiasco.
Many pranksters, including myself, have jokingly joked that Musk’s mismanagement is a golden opportunity for compulsive tweeters to break free from their digital addiction and touch some weed. Twitter’s demise will have greater impact if it highlights the need for a truly open and decentralized digital network.
Meta is not the champion we need to make this vision a reality. Libra was a great success, even if it ultimately failed. Threads’ use of a decentralized backend also represents a massive endorsement of this idea and a major boost to the broader ActivityPub ecosystem, even if the majority of Threads users don’t care at all.
