Its a monopoly, its behaving like a monopoly. But because of network effects, we cannot just ignore it, we have to go in direct combat.

At least if you want the Fediverse (with a diverse instance-landscape) to become big, confrontation with Meta is inevitable.

If you don’t want it to become big, that’s fine, but then we have a different opinion there.

Fair point - but: along with threads, hopefully there will be many other instances with, say, 20 million users combined. So the instance will still have 20 million users federating. And if the reason for the defederation was justified, maybe other instances will jump along too and then Threads loses 21 million users as well.

I think its not clear yet who will be eating whose lunch. It will be probably be a continuous back and forth.

Why is what too late?

Ok, so we have come to a conclusion here. That’s fine. What I’m not sure about is whether these two standpoints will complement each other in some way or work against each other in the future.

I at least will take some interesting points away from this.

That’s a good point. I could imagine Meta will try kind of a “franchising” of the Fediverse. With many little Threads-instances popping up that are not maintained by Meta itself but give it a fee for their software.

I think we should all be incredibly critical of any community and systems maintenance challenges in software released by meta, and be diligent about testing migrate-away scenarios. In fact, I would say that if they do release self hostable software, we make sure to port all the good features to FOSS software as quickly as possible.

Sounds like a good point although I’m not really in the opensource community to know how the dynamics are. Is it a threat scenario that is common and doesn’t this already fall under EEE?

I’m not. I’m saying Meta will most likely behave abusive, but not all the time and because Threads will be a major instance in the Fediverse soon, we will not be able to afford blocking it permanently.

And that’s why, even if it may not feel good, we will need to find some handle of interacting with Threads that goes beyond simply defederating.

https://www.theverge.com/23990974/social-media-2023-fediverse-mastodon-threads-activitypub

In this article, The Verge is describing what they think may happen to the Fediverse in the next years: big time commercialization.

Now the current Fediverse can either try to adapt to this new stage and try to grow with it; or block it out entirely and stay small. These two factions are by some called “big” and “small fedi”.

I’m a supporter of “big fedi”, because I think people will just move to other instances that federate with the big ones if we don’t. From my perspective, a big bull is charging right at us. We can either jump on it, ride it and try to taim it; or get trampled dead by it.

Its a play on embrace, extend and extinguish (EEE) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

I mean, that was a leap ahead, but there are currently a few companies directing towards the fediverse: Meta, Wordpress, Medium, Mozilla, Flipchart. Also look at the most recent The Verge arcticles about the fediverse, they are also pushing the point that the social web will be a growing market in 2024 (https://www.theverge.com/23990974/social-media-2023-fediverse-mastodon-threads-activitypub).

You could say that this is all hype, but I think its clear the “hobby phase” of the Fediverse is beginning to end and a new phase starts. At the latest when Threads federates with Mastodon.