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Threads is making moves for Mastodon integration
(www.threads.net)
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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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This may be a cynical view, but even if that does happen, the core ActivityPub protocol will still be intact and at worst be relegated to a small community of tech nerds, which is to say, basically the status quo.
The core of the software will be intact, but the community will be broken - because once Threads pulls the plug (EEE), instead of a stable community you'll have a shrinking one.
Or from another angle, they won't be able to entirely pull the plug. If they try to but users still want to be on mastodon, they can find another way.
That said, I support the immediate defederation with any threads instances.
They can pull it - most users in Threads will be interacting with other Threads users and content. Mastodon will be simply "that ideologically weird corner", and in practice they won't miss it.
For scale: Threads currently has 100M users. The Fediverse as a whole has 1.5M.
And I think that will go both ways. I mean, we all already have the option of joining threads right now to interact with those 100M users but I have a feeling most that are here aren't.
Their joining the fediverse will be more disruptive than their leaving it I think. And that's not even considering the higher costs to anyone running instances, since all that extra volume won't be processed and stored for free (though admittedly I am not familiar with the implementation details of how federated content is handled).
Eternal September-like? It's possible.
13+ million total users: https://fediverse.observer/stats
I'm counting only monthly active users, for both sides. FediDB lists 1.2M for the Fediverse, your link lists 1.7M of them.
Will it though? My guess is they're working on "fixing it" to what they want 24/7.
When a company uses Embrace Extend Extinguish, they are relying on network effects to drive people to their side. So let's say Threads comes out, starts federating, has a big established userbase, and then they come out with some new, proprietary killer feature. It could be great moderation tools - something kbin and the fediverse need, no doubt about it - but whatever the feature is, it draws users away from the existing fediverse infrastructure and into Threads. Threads then makes massive changes to the ActivityPub spec, building the walled garden back up again. Only this time, they've actually siphoned off some of the users you originally had in the community. The result isn't the status quo, Meta peeled away users who otherwise would have stayed.
By the way, while a "small community of tech nerds" is perfectly fine in its own right, I would argue the fediverse has already grown beyond that community. They're a large contingent no doubt, but there's also law enthusiasts, news outlets, game developers, users from Germany, Japan, France, Finland, and I follow them all. To see them leave for Threads would be a shame.