The OP talks about how Meta can get a lot of what they want -- including the regulatory aspects -- just by saying they'll integrate with the fediverse, and it's quite possible that's all they'll ever do. But there's a big potential upside for them if they decided to invest in it ... not so much today's fediverse (I agree about the inflated self-importance of a lot of the commentary -- no, they're not so desperate for content that they're trying to steal it from the fediverse) but the potential of decentralized surveillance capitalism. So, we shall see.
Right, a post embed that results in anybody visiting your site gets tracked by Meta (whether or not they have an account there).
You're completely right that there are likely to be major scalability issues, at this point I don't think anybody fully knows what the implications are, and it's not getting a lot of discussion. This is part of why Meta's proceeding slowly and presumably we'll see a lot of performance work over the next few months to deal with the expected onslaught.
Exactly. XMPP has hundreds of millions of users too (billions of you count WhatsApp's non-standard version) and Matrix has close to 100 million but we don't consider them part of the fediverse either.
Not as far as I know.
No, Meta claims that Threads has 100 million monthly active users, the fediverse as a whole has 1.4 - 1.7 million depending on whose statistics you use. Even if they're exaggerating, it's still much got a lot more users.
Why would Threads want to do that? Opt-in is better for their users from a privacy and safety perspective, and it's better for their business because it makes migration harder. And if Threads doesn't do that, politicians et al care more about reaching a large audience than about pushing Threads to try to change their mind.
That's the only one that's currently active as far as I know. https://mastodon.moule.world/@MOULE/110586556696261405 has a bunch of resources including blocklist for other Meta domains as well.
Glad you liked it, I like to put in a treat for people who read all the way to the end!
It's not a typo but I see what you mean, I meant that it has a lot fewer people in it but it's not great wording and I'll fix it. Thanks!
It would be great, but Threads has said that their plans are that people will have to opt in to federation. So if they follow through, why would politicians (or the others you mention) prefer to be on an instance where they only get access to a fraction of Threads' huge audience?
Yep. Meta's convinced him that this is a huge victory for Mastodon -- and a good way for him to achieve his goal of getting Mastodon to 100,000,000 users.