IMHO this is 100% the plan. If they play their cards right they stand to take out two birds with one stone (heh). They've already paid celebrities to be on there.

Still, this can only happen if Threads gets massive enough relative to the rest of the fediverse that the incompatibility doesn't hurt them equally.
...that is to say, it's all pretty likely, unless other strong competitors show up with ActivityPub support.

It's not gonna extinguish the fediverse in the same way nobody leaving reddit joined Mastodon as a replacement. They're technically compatible, but these are entirely different styles of sites we're talking about. Lemmy and Kbin are gonna keep on trucking regardless of what happens to the Twitter-likes.

But they're definitely going to try and kill Mastodon/similar through social engineering. Everybody's favorite content creators, organizations, and brands will be on Threads, not Mastodon, and when they lock it down we'll lose access to them and end up needing a Threads account. I don't understand why anyone trusts this company won't try to secure market dominance and then monopolize it. The guy says "we'll just be right back where we are now," but this could easily decrease the Mastodon population by pulling away anyone who doesn't care about federation or open source and just wanted a decent Twitter alternative.

I think the people that value being on a decentralized service will stay on a decentralized server. The people that would abandon one platform to follow their favorite "high follower" poster are normies that never cared about what service they were using to begin with. Meta may absolutely take a large share of users to their platform in the future if they shut off federation and our favorite celebrities and shitposters are no longer visible. But I don't really see how that is any different than Twitter currently having all the celebrities and high volume shitposters. We already can't see them. The EEE argument just strikes me as sour grapes that "their" users are going somewhere else. And I'm on the fediverse (both Mastodon and kbin) so I see the value here. But I'm not going to get angry that normies don't want to put the effort into learning this ecosystem when they have their own lives and struggles and a limited number of social causes to care about.

Now what does bother me is Meta having an outsized influence on the development of the protocol of ActivityPub. We've seen something similar to this with Google using Chrome to push some additions to how browsers handle HTML standards/elements, like supporting DRM.

The thing is that this can happen even without active malice.

If the product owners or engineers decide "hey, we want to add this cool feature, but it's not supported by activity pub" the path of least resistance -- bypassing the long process of changing the activity pub spec and getting everyone else on board -- can be super tempting, and come from a place of wanting to make your product better.

Those ostensibly good intentions can lead to E/E/E without actively meaning to.

What should happen? That's all public information, they can (and probably do) scrape this already. As does all and any AI project and company.

I've posted this elsewhere in the thread so hopefully it doesn't feel spammy, but this is from their privacy policy:

"Information From Third Party Services and Users: We collect information about the Third Party Services and Third Party Users who interact with Threads. If you interact with Threads through a Third Party Service (such as by following Threads users, interacting with Threads content, or by allowing Threads users to follow you or interact with your content), we collect information about your third-party account and profile (such as your username, profile picture, IP address, and the name of the Third Party Service on which you are registered), your content (such as when you allow Threads users to follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in your posts), and your interactions (such as when you follow, like, reshare, or have mentions in Threads posts).

We use the information we collect for Threads for the purposes described in the Meta Privacy Policy, including to provide, personalize, and improve Threads and other Meta Products (including seamless personalization of your experience across Threads and Instagram), to provide measurement, analytics and other business services (including ads), to promote safety, integrity and security, to communicate with you, and to research and innovate for social good."

https://help.instagram.com/515230437301944?helpref=faq_content

Isn't all of that already available to Meta (and anyone else) via the web UI anyway? They don't need to be federated for that, they can just use a web crawler. And I assume they are.

Frankly, there are other instances out there that I'm more worried about than Threads.

EEE, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Meta may very well be embracing federation concepts to eventually return back to their former selves.

Ima guess that Meta’s support and brand recognition dwarfs Mastodon’s, not re-assuring and rather self absorbed imo.

Yeaaah, when I read this I was just like, "Have you been outside of Mastodon lately? The brand's not so great to those folks that have heard of it in context." Nearly every time I've seen Mastodon come up outside of Mastodon, it's to complain about it being confusing or only used by tech nerds and there's nobody worth following there.

And I personally like Mastodon, but there's no denying the brand's not reputable to many folks, and it's probably still relatively unfamiliar/unknown to a majority of folks that don't closely follow social media stuff.

I’m admittedly unfamiliar with Eugene, so was using the title listed in the blog post.

Actually the copyright option might be the best one. Theoretically speaking the instance would need to state that all work is licensed only and that every comment and post has the copyright retained to creator/OP.

It's just a simple tweak of the terms of service, but that would be enough to do it. Getting them to respect it is another ball game, because as we've seen with Midjourney and other photo apps, they have clearly scraped photos with watermarks that they didn't have access to, and have used them to both train their models, and in the final output. This is why there was discussion of a class action lawsuit, although I didn't hear where that ended up going.

And half of the feed is people talking about how addicted they already are.

I don't know about everyone else here, but my social media use involves me actively trying to avoid The Algorithm™. I subscribe specifically to what I want to see, and actively avoid everything else. You can't do this in the Threads app. So this is why I'll be using Trunks or Megalodon over the Threads client.

Every social media platform, UseNet, BBS, and forum -- and the planet Earth itself -- has had it's clique of garbage idiots, off in a corner, doing garbage idiot things. They're inevitable. They're even here on the Fediverse -- in our own precious instances -- already. If you don't engage them -- don't follow that person you hate the most, or sub to the community that stands for everything you hate -- things are actually pretty nice. All of this defederation talk feels extremely short-sighted, and is just going to torpedo the Mastodon platform we've started to come to enjoy.

If anything, the public declarations of political & social allegiances via choice of instance could just torpedo it all, and attract the trolling idiots like flies. But, we've already opened up that can of worms.

You've completely missed the point. It's not that Facebook (and by extension, their users) will connect to Mastodon, it's that they will take over Mastodon, seizing all control for themselves, and coopting the existing userbase.

Right now it's a separate product. Just like people know that Twitter is not Mastodon, Threads isn't either. If you want to reach Twitter users, you get a Twitter account. If you want to reach Mastodon users, you get a Mastodon account. Facebook is planning to market themselves as the best way to enter the Mastodon ecosystem. Before long, they will be the absolute dominant server. Then they will have control, because defederation is a weapon they can wield and not vice-versa.

This is not theoretical, either. Google did the EXACT same thing back with Google Talk and the XMPP protocol. And we know how Facebook operates, so we know that this will eventually happen. The only way to stop it is before it starts - Facebook users need to be unhappy (at Facebook) that they can't reach Mastodon users, so that defederation remains their own problem.

(Separately, I agree with you that Lemmy needs to become more accessible to the common user. But simply handing it all over to someone as awful as Zuck is not the way)