cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/12225991
TL;DR: The common view on Meta’s Threads is that it will be either all good or all bad, leading to oversimplified and at the end contra productive propositions like the Fedipact. But in reality, it’s behaviour will most likely change dynamically over time, and therefore, to prevent us getting in a position, in which Threads can actually perform EEE on us, we need to adapt a dynamic strategy as well.
People that go to Bluesky or Threads are happy in their corporate gardens. The fediverse is not really an option for most of those people, anymore than Facebook is not really an option for me. If Facebook thought that threads could possibly lose more users than it gained, they wouldn’t federate.
Facebooks interests are diametrically opposed to the fediverse’s. They aren’t “just another server”, they are a multi billion dollar surveillance capitalist juggernaut. Thinking that you can somehow benefit from any kind of relationship with them is wrongheaded, IMO.
Why do people feel like we need rapid growth in numbers? The fediverse is still under development, and past events have often strained the infrastructure. Will threads users even be ‘impressed’ by our homespun alternative if it struggles under the weight of replicating millions of paid posts?
To tell you the truth, I am disappointed and saddened by what I see as the end of this whole fediverse experiment. To think that in the end we will happily give away what we worked so hard to build.
I don’t need rapid growth, but I do want growth. Any* users we can siphon off of Threads is a win.
*Any assuming good faith users. I’m against active shitheads. The Fediverse should not reshape itself to fit Threads, Threads should reshape to fit into the Fediverse.
We are siphoning users off corporate platforms already. Almost everyone on the fediverse has left those networks to come here. They did it without Facebook or twitter federation, and people will continue to do that without Facebook or twitter federation.
Threads absolutely not “reshape” itself to fit the fediverse. They are playing to win, and winning for them means mass collection of analytics and social graphs to sell micro-targeted ads to their customers.
The fediverse is growing at the right speed, IMO, and inviting Facebook in to play, in the hopes of luring a few users is a bargain with the devil.
Considering the company’s history, I am more than a little perplexed at anyone thinking that there is significantly higher than a 0% chance of the effort being intended in good faith.
To clarify users, you and I, not the company.
The two are inseperable, unfortunately. Every commercial social media company exerts control over their users in numerous ways, including bots ane opaque algorithms. Given their hisory of everpthing from complicity in genocide to actively taking part in political influence campaigns, there is next to no chance of them acting in good faith, if federated. They will simply use their significant resources to try to control and pollute the fediverse.