this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Embrace, they join the fediverse seemingly in good faith. Bringing their larger userbase to massively increase the size of the fediverse.
Extend, they add some features that are convenient when interacting with their base across the fediverse. But these conveniences require proprietary software integration.
Extinguish, once enough users and platforms are tied into the conveniences of extend, they use that to force compliance. Stricter and stricter rules on their proprietary software. Comply or die.
The fediverse won't be gone afterwards, but if it EEE works then we will end up very stifled.
The outcome then would be that Meta’s instance would be defederated/defederate itself - how would that be different from now?
They'd probably attract more people (even people that are here right now) before doing so. Thus creating another centralized platform.
If the Threads product was so superior, and Mastodon so unable to respond that millions would leave Mastodon - sure. I doubt it though..
You’re severely underestimating the budget Meta can throw at this. Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. right now are largely volunteer-run as opposed to full-time employees.
That argument suggests open source products couldn’t possibly compete with a closed-source alternative.
They can compete of they have the manpower to do so. Lemmy has literally only 2 devs. How many devs can Meta pay to work on Threads and outpace it?
Threads isn’t a Lemmy competitor - it competes with Mastodon
But they can easily implement Lemmy-like features on it or make another sister-app. It isn't hard to bruteforce such things when you have that much money and developers
I wouldn't underestimate them though. After all, they own some of the biggest social network platforms on the globe and have the formula to hook people up down to a t.
While Threads is federated social circles and communities will have time to form. Thread users will by nature of having the support of a corporate juggernaut, be the lions share of users on the 'verse. When threads pull the plug, the Fedverse becomes a ghost town overnight and everyone not on Threads will be forced to migrate if they want to keep their social circles and communities intact.
I think few people would migrate away in that scenario. Some might create additional accounts (none of this is zero-sum). It’s not unlikely that Mastodon itself will become bigger because of it, and it’ll get hard for Meta to unilaterally pull the plug - a bit like email.