I don’t understand what Meta will gain from participating in the fediverse? Their ultimate goal is to make money of Threads and I just don’t see how encouraging an open federation will help them do it? Even 3Eing the fediverse will not do them much good as they already have sooo much traffic already that killing the fediverse will not make a serious change in their figures. But OTOH it does seem like Threads is net positive for the fediverse ATM. Even if all current denizens of the fediverse will block Threads, there is a large group of people that are exposed to the concept of “fediverse” for the fist time and some of them will want to learn more. This is a good thing. Anyway, I don’t know why they are doing it, but I’m cautiously glad they did it. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
They can already do it by running a simple web scraper or running an anonymous instance that federates with everyone in disguise
but unless they are federated we won’t see the ads that they are going to disguise as legitimate user content.
On their app that should be harder to skip because the timeline is based on their algorithm and ads should be unavoidable, but how the hell would they force a user on another platform to see it? And how would they even directly target this person with a specific ad? If what people on instances federated with Threads see on their federated timeline are regular posts from business accounts placed in chronological order, I’m guessing there’d be no problem just blocking those “profiles” and moving on
