Ultimately the fediverse is still an experiment. It clearly works, and in isolation many of the services (Lemmy, Matrix, etc.) work well enough on their own.

I'm not optimistic about anything at this point. The fediverse might die; it might not.

There could be huge incentives for them to convert Mastodon users over to Threads, based on their internal analytics, in which case the headache would be worth it.

Meta won't be dead anytime soon, but it's clear that they've made some risky plays, which means their decisions are going to continuously be less risky.

Can’t make money with the information that is public, they need the social connections to people that will see ads. They want to know our interests, and the interests of all the people we interact with. They don’t give a duck about IPs or emails, they can’t monetize those. So they will keep databases on all users and their connections and their interests all so they can show more appropriate ads. If they’re on the connected fediverse they’ll keep all that too, just in case. And any government can get this info if they ask for it.

#2 there is evidence of them wanting to do that. I’ll look up the thread on mastodon later (I’m on mobile rn).

#3 is a difficult one. I really don’t know why they even want this. I suspected it was to get active users on their initial timeline, but I guess that wasn’t that important to them after all. But there is a real chance of them stopping the growth of the fediverse or even minimizing the size and influence, simply to remove a competitor. Everything is better to them than having users calm down in a relaxing social media environment that is non toxic and could make them all obsolete and kill the whole social media industry’s MO

Far too many people in this thread seem to not understand that everything they post here is on the open, public internet, and it's infuriating.

The data is already public. The cat pictures are already public. Those pictures of food you posted on Instagram are public. All of those posts you put on Facebook with your real name and political beliefs and pictures of your family and social security number are public.

It's only not public if you choose to lock it down with permissions, but all that does is make it public to the corporation you don't trust. The Fediverse doesn't have that feature because they already know it's fucking pointless. Everything is a third-party server and nobody should trust any of the servers they post on.

If you don't want it to be public, don't post the message!