Once again, the world has been taken aback by Mark Zuckerberg, this time with his introduction of Threads, Meta’s new social media app that seems to be riding the wave of the crypto revolution. This isn’t his first stint into the world of crypto, with previous ventures such as the controversial Libra, now known as Diem, payment token, and the recent swerve towards the crypto-inspired metaverse.
This time, however, the move seems less risky. Threads resembles an existing product, and it draws its protocols from the open-source Mastodon system, according to Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri. The system, known as ActivityPub, is a protocol standard providing a form of data portability that has been demanded by digital activists for years now.
Inspiration for Thread’s development may have come from BlueSky and Nostr, projects aiming to decentralize social media too. Still, skepticism arises as with the adoption of a decentralized backend, Meta could possibly continue to gather data about users of the Threads app.
It’s worth pointing out that Threads is said to gather the ‘full spectrum’ of user data needed for Meta’s targeted-ad business model. Despite the promising decentralization at the backend, the front-end operation still gives rise to concerns about Meta’s notorious data-collecting habits, echoing the company’s past endeavors with Libra.
There are additional complications that may pose problems for Threads. There have been concerns about the user-friendliness of ActivityPub protocol-based platforms, with critics often dubbing them clumsy and unintuitive.
The crypto community’s distrust towards Meta runs deep, as they often leave privacy concerns unattended. Unless truly public and decentralized digital infrastructure becomes a reality, this mistrust is likely to persist.
Elon Musk‘s takeover of Twitter has also raised eyebrows and expedited the call for decentralized social platforms, with his questionable decisions leading to an exodus of users from Twitter. Meta seems to be ready to seize this opportunity, albeit, the general consensus amongst many users is that Meta may not be the right entity to foster decentralized digital platforms.
Yet again, just like Libra previously endorsed the crypto industry despite failing, Threads’ use of decentralized backend could ultimately serve as a catalyst for the wider acceptance and usage of decentralized protocols such as ActivityPub. Whether this will pique the interest of Threads’ users remains to be seen. Nevertheless, confusion, suspicion, and hope once again blend into the complex landscape of the crypto-sphere.
Source: Coindesk
