The advantage of the Fediverse is exactly that, that each instance can decide if they federate or not. The thing that I’m wary of is a renewal of Embrace, extend, and extinguish. I’d like to think that Zuckerberg isn’t going to try playing dirty tricks, but we’ll see what happens if and when Threads ever becomes really successful.
EEE would require existing Mastodon users moving to threads
It would not.
Meta could implement ActivityPub in Facebook, and there’s your majority population. Imagine a Facebook user “friending” your mastodon account. You follow them back because it’s your mom, and so does basically everyone. Next, Facebook implements Pages to round off the concept of “communities.” Then, Facebook introduces a genuinely useful extension - marketplace. Once a decent clip of people set up shop, trim off any instances that don’t adopt the FriendlyPub fork.
There’s a lot of shitty things they can do. They could push for changes to ActivityPub that nobody sane wants, confusing everybody that says “We support ActivityPub”, and spread FUD about anyone that doesn’t move to their new shitty version. Similar to how Google pushes through changes to web standards that benefit them, forcing Firefox to implement them too.
I signed the pledge to not ever federate with them, and unlike the DARE pledges they made us sign in school, I’m taking this one seriously.
The advantage of the Fediverse is exactly that, that each instance can decide if they federate or not. The thing that I’m wary of is a renewal of Embrace, extend, and extinguish. I’d like to think that Zuckerberg isn’t going to try playing dirty tricks, but we’ll see what happens if and when Threads ever becomes really successful.
EEE would require existing Mastodon users moving to threads which I can’t see happening
It would not.
Meta could implement ActivityPub in Facebook, and there’s your majority population. Imagine a Facebook user “friending” your mastodon account. You follow them back because it’s your mom, and so does basically everyone. Next, Facebook implements Pages to round off the concept of “communities.” Then, Facebook introduces a genuinely useful extension - marketplace. Once a decent clip of people set up shop, trim off any instances that don’t adopt the FriendlyPub fork.
Bam, EEE.
And you’ll be back at square one, as if Facebook hadn’t federated in the first place. Which is essentially how the Fediverse is right now.
There’s a lot of shitty things they can do. They could push for changes to ActivityPub that nobody sane wants, confusing everybody that says “We support ActivityPub”, and spread FUD about anyone that doesn’t move to their new shitty version. Similar to how Google pushes through changes to web standards that benefit them, forcing Firefox to implement them too.
Then it’s up to Mastodon not to bow to the changes. The worst thing that can happen is that we lose federation with Threads again.