A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.
However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don’t have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.
What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it’d be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.
What actions can we take to deal with Threads?
I think defederation isn’t the solution. Am I dumb in thinking this could actual have a mutual benefit?
Just an example: I will never use Threads, but if I can communicate with them from my Mastodon account, I would like to have that option.
Many who don’t see the danger were not here in the 2000’s. There are so many great technical achievements that were killed by microsoft, google or facebook EEE’ing the shit out of it. Remember jabber/xmpp? Yeah, both FB and Google implemented the protocol in their chat apps. Everyone was thrilled; I could use my jabber client to connext to fb and talk to my friends. Then they remembered there’s not any money in that and killed the projects.
Even if it’s good for the fediverse now, as soon as they realize they can make more money by not having to sync with other companies and organizations, they’ll be out of here, leaving nothing behind like a swarm of locusts. The only defense is defederation.
XMPP was extremely niche before Google and it is slightly less niche right now. It did not die.
You can not destroy the fediverse with EEE in my opinion.
That’s the Embrace part, and it is mutually beneficial. Later on, Threads may give your Mastodon account a special color to mark you as one of the crazy socialists, and let their own users exchange unique awards, super-boosts, or other neat Extended features. Then connection between Threads and Mastodon-at-large becomes unreliable due to technical differences in protocol or just volume of content. Threads users see a handful of their friends drop off for no apparent reason, but ‘classic’ Mastodon users lose almost everyone and the platform is effectively Extinguished.
This strategy works so well it’s scary. Though sometimes the open protocol ends up winning… Spotify has been trying to kill podcasts for ages, but they’re not winning even by dumping money into exclusive content.
Spotify and Meta is after different products and customers. They are here to find opportunity to gather more data or clever way of monetizing content. Fediverse/users will be their product not their customers.
So you’d end up … exactly where we are now?
I wouldn’t call you dumb, but naive yeah. I don’t trust anything facebook does and them trying to get involved here is just another shot at unethical data collection. The content on all their sites is shit and sinpleminded so imo nothing they do should be welcome here.