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
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.
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.
You can hardly kill a decentralized network. Even if we fall back to field 1. People who actively chose freedom will stay.
You can: by making it irrelevant. It’s not dead then, but not used also. And that is what’s planned here.
It’s already irrelevant, it’s never been. The Fediverse is well over a decade old and most people don’t know it exists.
It’s irrelevant to you, but a community doesn’t have to be massive for it to be important to it’s users, it just has to be big enough for people to get something out of it regularly to keep the existing userbase engaged. Lemmy pre-migration is a great example. But if enough people leave in a short timespan it’s really hard to keep the remaining userbase engaged after that drop-off. XMPP is a good example of this actually happening, I had a bunch of friends on there for years. When google pulled the rug, a lot of users lost a lot of their reasons for sticking around. It’s a shell of itself now.
XMPP was largely irrelevant before Google and went back to being that way after Google and a bunch of newer tech. It wasn’t directly connected to Google. Nothing outside of someone’s blog would even indicate that. I didn’t say it’s irrelevant to me. To me is not important. Globally and in terms of social media it is in fact irrelevant. Not even sure why you said irrelevant to me that doesn’t even match the context
