Fediverse

Called it. I said this last week when everyone was still hysterical about blocking Meta:

Everyone is talking about defederating preemptively because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it's much less likely to succeed.

Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can't just copy Twitter - it has to be "Twitter, but better". So, doing what any exec does, he looks for buzzwords and trends to make his new product more exciting. Hence the fediverse.

From Meta's standpoint, they don't need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I'm sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.

TL;DR below:

I reminded of the end of season 1 of Foundation, where the Foundation stayed hidden from the empire for a long time, growing in strength and technology.

Season 2 is pretty good so far

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 a clear victory. It'll be a few months.

You mean all of the ridiculous bullshit complaining and bragading that has been going on here for weeks was pointless?

They did something similar a few years ago.

At one point they opened their messenger system and allowed XMPP clients to connect. This worked absolutely fine, and chatting in any XMPP compatible client was possible.

But it was also possible to OTR encrypt the data so Facebook only got seemingly random character strings that are absolutely useless for data harvesting and profile analysis to sell to advertisers, so they closed down the messenger and disabled the XMPP bridge not long after they opened it.

Same will happen here: As soon as people start interacting in a way it is not possible for the company to track everything, they will stop allowing it.

On a personal note: I will defederate from Meta as soon as they establish their ActivityPub bridge (it of course will only be a bridge, or does anyone really think they would base one of their main features on an open standard?)

Threads seems to have achieved its immediate strategic goal of setting fire to zombie Twitter so that it'd stay dead; building it into an actual Twitter replacement could take years, and in the meanwhile there's plenty of time for Mastodon et al to keep hoovering up users too.

Personally, I don't post anything on Threads, and haven't really tried to obtain any followers there, but I do log on and view/like content from famous people I used to follow on Twitter in the hopes that if they get enough engagement on Threads they'll cut out Twitter altogether.