As you’ve probably heard, Threads (a fairly new social network from Facebook’s parent company Meta) is testing integration with the fediverse. Depending on how you look at it, it’s a great opportunity, a huge threat, or both!
Back in May and June, when Threads’ first announced their plans, there were quite a few polls on Mastodon about people’s reactions, most showing opinions split roughly equally. How do people feel today?
I don’t see how it’s a threat. They can’t take over the whole federation.
Sure they can. Like Google took over XMPP.
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It’s not so much that they’d take it over, it’s that they’d extend it (in incompatible ways) and exploit it. XMPP still exists and there are bunches of clients for it, but it’s basically where it was 15 years ago when Google et al first adopted it. Ploum’s got some great pespectives on the XMPP experience at https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html and there are a lot of parallels.
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Having read that article earlier in another thread, it sounds much more like the devs working on XMPP killed it themselves by cowtowing to whatever the fuck Google was doing instead of continuing their own forks because they didn’t want to lose the users gained through Google Talk by simply not caring about it. Greed killed it, but the greed wasn’t Google’s alone.
So devs targeting Google users is greed.
Instances targeting Meta users is smart?