The theory goes like this: a company decides to support an open standard, because it’s a popular thing that people expect support for. Then, when that company’s offering hits a critical mass of users, they quietly kill off support for that standard and keep the people on their platforms.
Company decides to support an open standard. Once it hits a critical mass, they take control of that standards body. Then they quietly kill of their competition through the standard its self.
If anything, it may be that Threads is looking to be a major player in the space, and hopes to benefit from an ecosystem shift by being the biggest project out there. Maybe that situation looks like developing a better API and clients than what Mastodon has, and getting other platforms to use it over MastoAPI.
Now you’ve got the right of it. Activity hub represents a real existential threat to meta in a way that reddit and twittter as corporate entities don’t. Twitter, reddit, etc, they all have more or less the same incentives around what their ultimate goal is for users. This is fundamentally different in the fediverse. Its a difference of alignment in incentives.
The promise of the Fediverse is that individuals ought to be in charge of who and what they see on the network.
Its definitely more than that. Reddit didn’t make reddit, redditors did. Twitter didn’t make twitter, people tweeting did. Youtube with out people posting content isnt youtube. A major, if not the main point, of the fediverse is that its we own the network, not some third party. Its our content, our community, our network.
Either we’re all going to drown in the noise produced by Threads, or the networks will become increasingly isolated.
Yeah. I have a post on that some where else earlier today. The basic math and network mechanics of it mean that even with marginal adoption, Threads federating is an extinction level event for non-threads instances. If one in ten thousand adopt threads and have a roughly equal engagement rate as current lemmy.world users, there will be a 1:1000 ratio of Threads to non-threads content. Because of this the math involved in social networks will basically make it impossible for any non-threads content to bubble to the top.
A part of me remains incredibly optimistic: the Fediverse might actually hit an inflection point that transforms the entire Internet for billions of people. In our battle against social siloes and surveillance capitalism, we might find that the Fediverse won.
Appreciate the article, don’t necessarily agree with all of the conclusions, but really appreciate the work. My bigger concern isn’t even threads dominating and making the rest of the fediverse irrelevant. My concern is Meta taking control of ActivityPub through soft engagement/ coercion/ engagement. The protocol is whats important, and realistically, we’re still in the infancy of federation & the fediverse. Its underfunded/ a hobby project at best. But its also our best real shot at a free and open internet we can all be a part of. I think it the fediverse needs (no pun intended) some really significant ‘meta’ level improvements that deal with distancing and federation with more granularity. On/ Off federation prevented us from getting to one million users, and a lack of engagement is still whats holding us back.