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Meta's 'Threads' wants to colonize the Fediverse
(fortune.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Maybe I'm just too cynical, but I think it's naive to assume Meta is embracing ActivityPub out of the goodness of their heart, effectively giving free content away to federated instances with no strings attached.
I think it's also naive to assume Threads users will migrate to the Fediverse proper and not just interact through Threads. The vast majority of those users may not even realise they're interacting with people outside of Threads.
I don't believe it'll translate to a growing community, it may very well oversaturate us instead.
This is not cynicism. It's realism. Corporations (especially Meta) have no heart, soul, or care for any externalities to the generation of profit.
The best case is that they will slowly ease into things by contributing to FOSS repos/projects while silently developing proprietary versions or extensions which wall it off.
I don’t think anyone suggested Meta is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. I certainly didn’t write that. They want to make money.
As for cross-pollination, it’s basically a law in SaaS now. When you expose users to something, some of them engage. Meta can’t hide the existence of other instances else there’s no point in federating. If users are other instances, and interact with users from those instances, some of them will create accounts on those instances.