Hello, compatriots! I’m new here (joined a few hours ago) I’m more than glad to become a part of what is referred to as the ‘new face of Reddit’. What brought about my joining was my search into the Fediverse after Threads come out with the promise of being a part in future iterations of the application. With the take over of Twitter which left many disgruntled leading to the masses at Mastodon (of which I’m one) and Threads coming up strong just at the nick of posing a stern, I can only but imagine what the future holds Decentralisation and Web 3.0 seems to be the direction we are steadily heading though its development has taken a dip over the years. I’m glad to be a part of this and would love to see what becomes of the new developments and the Fediverse!
Long live the Fediverse, Long live Lemmy!
The pessimistic take is that it’s part of Embrace, Extend and Extinguish. As well as the examples there, look up how XMPP ran into problems.
The more optimistic take is that they feel that they can add sufficient features and convenience that they’ll be able to poach Fediverse user’s back into their now partly walled gardens. I like to think it will go the other way and the most active users will realise that giving all their stuff to a faceless megacorporation for free is a bad deal and they move over here. Easy for Twitter and Instagram users, not so easy for those on platforms that give you a cut of the revenue you generate for your overlords. Hopefully, alternate sources of revenue would make up for it but it likely won’t beyond the big stars.
There’s also another take that Threads becoming federated could be used by Meta as a defense against accusations of monopoly (if it becomes the new Twitter, they’ll be running all three of the three largest social media platforms) and protecting it from falling afoul of the EU’s new Digital Markets Act, which designates “gatekeeper” companies that control large platforms, placing additional legal requirements on them which force them to demonstrate that they are competing fairly and openly.
Meta could either hope that by federating, they can claim they’re not in “control” of the platform and so not a gatekeeper at all, or failing that, that by using an open protocol that’s compatible with other similar services, that they’re competing fairly. At best, this is using the fediverse as a smokescreen: Threads is only a few days into existence and is already at least five times the size of the entire fediverse put together, but in this theory it’s to their benefit to maintain just enough compatibility to avoid getting in trouble with the regulators.