I blogged about what happened in June, and the financial overview.
Hi, thanks! Yes I’ve read that, and I don’t see how that could happen to Lemmy or Mastodon. I’ve see comments that people will follow their friends on Threads and then when Threads disconnects, people will leave Fediverse and join Threads. My question is why would they be on Fediverse and not on Twitter/Facebook, where their friends are now.
I mean I see what happened to XMPP but I don’t see that happening to Lemmy. It’s not the same. But feel free to chat with me about this, maybe I’m wrong and someone can convince me. My Matrix account is in my profile or just use DM.
So I wrote down some of my thoughts below, if you want to chat about it, feel free to leave a comment or DM me. (I don’t have Matrix, sorry)
So the core component of any social network is the network effect. In short, the reason we use Lemmy is because others also use Lemmy. We wouldn’t use it if there was nobody here (with thanks to Spez).
Indeed, that’s why people still use Reddit, Facebook, or any social medium: they don’t care about the platform, but about the people.
If Threads federates with Lemmy, they will instantly dominate the entire space: the most popular communities and most of the user activity will all be over there. (There are already 100M Threads users compared to under 2M Lemmy users, so this is essentially inevitable.)
If Meta would then later decide to defederate, the majority of Lemmings will be cut off from their communities. If in the meantime those communities had become important to them, their hand may be forced to sign up for Threads. Lemmy will survive, but it won’t be the same for most of its users.
Essentially, we have a choice to make: either we welcome Threads and accept that we will be at the whims of Meta for >90% of our communities and content (given their massively higher user count), OR we choose to be independent at the cost of having smaller communities and less content.
I would argue though, that having smaller communities may even be a pro rather than a con. I’ve seen many comments that the smaller scale of the Fediverse feels like a breath of fresh air compared to Reddit (and personally I agree with that).
That would be true if Threads would support communities. Which they don’t. If they ever would (which I don’t think) then this would be a valid point and need consideration.
For Meta, it would be trivial to add support for communities if they wanted, given that they wrote the entire Threads backend in-house anyway.
Also, even if they don’t support communities, their users might (perhaps even unknowingly) still be interacting with the Lemmyverse, just like Mastodon users can.
I think question to ask is what does Meta have to gain by joining the fediverse? They don’t need to. Their strength has been their large user base who are too dependent on their services to quit, and this small population is of no interest. So then why? What could be the reason a multi billion dollar organization would join the fediverse with a history of data mining and buying out other companies to increase their influence? Is forming a partnership with them to access their user base really a great idea? Why did people run from Reddit to jump into the arms of Meta? Is Zuckerberg really that much more trusting than Spez just because he doesn’t go on public tantrums and is using this open source tech? Do people want to be that connected with what Meta has to offer despite having been so adamant about deleting material from reddit and leaving behind their communities there? Is gaining influence in the space before the platform even becomes remotely mainstream friendly a strategic move on their part to stop it before it even happens?
It’s been hard enough trying to reform communities after leaving reddit and then finding to yet again try to reform communities on another instance and hoping people move there may be a hurdle that leads people back to Reddit where at least it is a more separate experience from meta. It does make me glad though that slowly communities are starting to become more spread out like Android forming their own instance just in case another migration from a big place happens. But, those are some of the concerns people have had where despite the ire towards Reddit recently they are still way better than Meta. I want see this place grow as something separate from corporate entities, but if many instances start partnering with then too then aside from use of small independent instances it starts feeling pointless to replace full time for the corporate experience.
