Threads seems to be poised to take the Fediverse mainstream. Whether it's the first step in an Embrace/Extend/Extinguish strategy is not really relevant. The fact remains that Meta will bring the idea of "[email protected]" identities into mainstream consciousness. I suspect that this will be good for the Fediverse, at least in the short term.
That said, I'm worried that Meta will only choose to federate with a whitelist of ActivityPub instances, which would certainly be a long term harm to the Fediverse. Maybe they'll prove me wrong though. Zuck is more philosophical than people give him credit for, and I think he's aware of the mistakes he made that caused people to lose trust in Meta. He has an opportunity to embrace (for better or worse) federation as a way to distinguish Meta from its increasingly centralized peers.
It's also an opportunity to expose the disingenuity of Musk, who ironically promised to "turn the platform into 'something new that’s decentralized" [0] but is now suing Meta for making a product that more closely resembles that description than does Musk's recent behavior of view limits and auth walls.
This is probably true. But how long should we wait for the fediverse to get its act together? There’s a critical mass of people who want to leave Twitter and lots of pent up demand.
My first testing of the waters in the fediverse was about a year ago and I ended up looking at lots of "also on mastodon" variants of Twitter accounts I liked to read. Only slowly I realized that most of those weren't "I'm also on mastodon" operated by the same people but passive mirrors, most not even operated by someone in any way related to the original account. On paper that looks good, "hey, you can also follow x, y and z on mastodon!" but in reality the feeling of merely looking at shadows was extremely present, almost like in plato's cave. Now that Twitter is trying hard to silence the APIs of sneaking behind those "shadows", my mastodon feels much better. It's almost as if Musk fixed a huge mastodon bug.
It's been working just fine for years. The people don't want a platform they have to genuinely participate in. They want celebrities, corporations and their data to be stolen and sold to see it as a successful platform for mindlessly browsing.
Are you implying that the fediverse failed because the builders of the main apps don’t understand the market, that they’re unwilling to give people what they want out of a platform, or something else?
I don't think the fediverse failed. I think the average joe doesn't sign up for Mastodon and Kbin because it doesn't have celebrities, corporations, ads and data harvesting. Celebrities and corporations needs to be paid, at least initially, to be on the platform which a decentralized platform is never going to do.
I can confirm that when I’m shopping at WalMart and polling average Joes on why they aren’t joining Mastodon, one of the top reasons they cite is the lack of data harvesting, followed closely by the lack of ads. Perhaps the fediverse can avoid the fate you’re predicting if they add in maybe just a little data harvesting?
Celebrities get a lot out of these platforms without having to be paid. They get everything that us normies do (because, ultimately, celebrities are people too) PLUS they get all the promotional advantages, a direct feedback loop (which many crave, despite claims to the contrary), etc.
Most celebrities didn't need to be paid to get an email address.
Their goal is be compatible with the old fediverse, gain all the users by showing all the instances content, then become incompatible with the old fediverse and kill it. Then at that point there is no more fediverse because Threads by itself is not a federated system.
I firmly believe this is the case. They will lure in users with things like video hosting and better spam filtering, while making it increasingly harder for the fediverse to exist (for example by participating in the development of the common interfaces and making them increasingly complex), then eventually just closing off altogether when they have large enough user base.
Having corporations participate to fediverse will only be a bad thing, apart from some short term gains.
