This is good for us, and for businesses, influencers and celebrities.
They need to be encouraged to operate their own instances, and not just an account in Threads or elsewhere in Meta.
- You get to have a “home base” for your presence on Threads and the Fediverse that’s independent of Big Tech. Ah, the advantages of owning your online house instead of renting! That’s why we have a Fediverse.
- You get to make the rules, not Meta. You’re not getting your content taken down by a faceless corp because some AI software mistakenly concluded you violated TOS. You’re not gonna get NSFW’d out of business so some CEO can make bucks with an IPO. And you can kick off the jerkwads that are harassing you when Meta won’t.
- You get to structure communities/discussions on your instance the way you want.
AND, getting enough celebrities, influencers and businesses to operate their own instances will take power away from Meta. If there’s a critical mass of in-demand people and content outside of Meta in the Fediverse, and Threads users get access to that content, Meta won’t be able to wall up the garden without a riot from their users. Enough celebrities on Threads, but not on their servers, and Meta will be forced to keep things open and make EEE much harder for them.
Now all we need is for a few in-demand people to make that leap…
Thoughts?
The big attraction for using TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Threads, whatever, is the ease of use, the almost zero learning curve. Find a hosting company that has a 1-click instance install, and then put an admin frontend on it where just about anybody can just check boxes to configure it. Once you’ve done that, everybody will spin up their own instance.
I highly doubt most users would want to pay to makes their experience harder.
How many people host their own email server?
I believe heavy users, such as influencers, companies, and some government agencies would want to host their own instances.