I don’t understand what Meta will gain from participating in the fediverse? Their ultimate goal is to make money of Threads and I just don’t see how encouraging an open federation will help them do it? Even 3Eing the fediverse will not do them much good as they already have sooo much traffic already that killing the fediverse will not make a serious change in their figures. But OTOH it does seem like Threads is net positive for the fediverse ATM. Even if all current denizens of the fediverse will block Threads, there is a large group of people that are exposed to the concept of “fediverse” for the fist time and some of them will want to learn more. This is a good thing. Anyway, I don’t know why they are doing it, but I’m cautiously glad they did it. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
Their main goal is to kill twitter. Their second goal is to skirt antimonopoly laws when they succeed to kill twitter. Their third and optional goal is to starve twitter-like fediverse apps from users. They has loads of resource, if they can come with good and familiar ui without usual growing pains that fediverse has (server overloaded, client not ready), many non tech savy users will never look beyond threads. Thus robbing mastodon, calckey, pleroma, etc from potential users and attention.
While I agree overall, I definitely agree with that last sentence. As someone who originally joined the Fediverse for the first in March via Mastodon, I’ve since then spread out and tried the many other fedi products (is that even the right word to use?) and have since settled on a Misskey forked server called Foundkey for my “Twitter” experience. While I agree with others that Threads being part of the Fediverse is good, I also agree in that the familiarity with Meta/Facebook will make people not want to branch out and explore what else the Fediverse has to offer which in turn hurts everyone else.
They can (will) do that without federating. Federating (or not) is not going to make any appreciable difference.
This is why I place it as third and optional goal. Few percent of people who knows fediverse doesn’t participate in it because not many instance is as reliable as big companies service. They may be willing to migrate to mastodon when the software is more matured, but now migrating to threads instead because of meta’s backing.
Don’t you think people will switch from threads to Mastodon? I think there are allot of people who would rather not have Meta’s app installed on their phone.
In western cultural hemisphere, yes. Antimeta and anti big-corporation backed social media has gained big momentum.
Meanwhile on global south, they didn’t even know what privacy is. And fediverse user on my country is less than 1000 from tens of millions people. In global-south at least, I saw potential to introduce fediverse to greater masses using thread.