this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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[–] DanseMacabre@lemmy.world 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (22 children)

Threads being in the Fediverse is a plus for me, not a negative. It means I could follow regular people and friends who would never in a million years join places like Mastodon or Lemmy while I still get the benefits of being on those platforms, all while being shielded from Meta’s ads and data harvesting. The only issue is I don’t actually believe Zuck will go through with it. They’ll either never federate or severely limit it if they do.

Mastodon themselves have put out a post outlining how this will affect them (it won’t) and how EEE is not a threat. If Meta does eventually opt out of ActivityPub then cool. It’s not like that’s why Mastodon users were there in the first place.

[–] lazyvar@programming.dev 46 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Mastodon the non-profit is all but compromised.

The guy in charge is essentially in cahoots with Meta and is under an NDA from them.

It doesn’t take more than 2 seconds of thinking to see how empty the words are that Mastodon is not at risk.

  1. Threads federates with Mastodon instances
  2. Threads uses its massive engineering resources to implement proprietary functionality that’s incompatible with Mastodon instances
  3. A non-trivial number of Mastodon users jump over to Threads, this is the first wave of people that leave Mastodon
  4. Threads drops support for federation and silos itself off
  5. The majority of the remainder of people on Mastodon jump over to Threads because they want to be able to continue to interact with the people that jumped over to Threads and/or because they want to be able to continue to interact with normies now that they’re used to that
  6. Mastodon is effectively dead, safe for a select few that stick to their guns

3 and 5 will happen in a cascading manner, the more people switch to Threads, the more others will also want to switch.

[–] chakan2@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Number 3 will be difficult since most of the users moving are moving to get away from Meta. I find it hard to believe they'd just jump back into that ecosystem.

[–] furikuri@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

A lot of people aren't really ideologically opposed to Meta, they're just on Mastodon since it's there's less friction to use it than Twitter (see rise of Bluesky). Threads will "fix" a lot of issues people have with Mastodon (CW, no algorithm, inability to advertise, instances moving/going under) and they'll move without thinking anything of it since they can still access all of their Mastodon content

Of course the move back isn't going to be as easy, I doubt Meta is going to implement robust account migration, and then the easier choice is to stay on Threads. This is also ignoring the ~~incompatibilities~~ improvements to ActivityPub that Meta will introduce later on in Meta's lifespan, which will be poorly documented and rapidly changing if they open it up at all

Even if many Mastodon users don't switch immediately, this is enough to hamper the long term growth/health of the platform

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