I totally agree with him. This will bring more people to the fediverse once they realize they can interact with their friends on Threads
I totally agree with him. This will bring more people to the fediverse once they realize they can interact with their friends on Threads
No, this will get people to leave Mastodon for Threads in droves. Really all Facebook is doing here is leaching users away from Mastodon. The average user doesn’t know or care about the “perks” of non-Facebook Mastodon instances that Eugene is talking about. They will go with the service with the most name recognition every time, rather than trust an independent, small-time instance operator.
Threads is just Facebook with ActivityPub compatibility and Facebook ads and tracking, so basically they are pulling people away from decentralized networks and back to being under their control. Then the network effects Eugene is talking about will kick in, but moving people away from Mastodon and toward Threads.
Then Facebook can quietly drop support for Mastodon compatibility. Embrace (is done), Extend (with search, advertising, and tracking), Extinguish, cut compatibility with non-Facebook instances and sink the decentralized network, then finally Enshittification.
If you’re already up and running on Mastodon and can interact with people on Threads, there’s literally no reason to swap one for the other.
I agree, but remember that the last step is to discontinue ActivityPub integration so people will move from mastodon over to threads to keep up with the content they got on mastodon from threads
This is about encouraging new users to join Facebook instead of one of those other Mastodon instances. Realistically, what percentage of people who join Threads will consider joining Mastodon or an independence instance instead when Facebook decides to drop support for Mastodon federation? I would guess that number at 1% or less. In other words, 99% of all Threads users are stuck there for the entire term of their service, never actually joining Mastodon.
The point of Facebook investing all of this money into setting up Threads is to eliminate competition from decentralized services. They are terrified that they are losing all of the control over the Internet that they have slowly acquired over the past 15 years or so, they are trying to take it back and destroy the competing network of federated independent services.
I’m actually baffled that people are buying into facebooks shit. Zuck isn’t doing this because he wants to help the competition.