ŚéáńInteresting comment on Hackernews regarding a possible scenario/long term risk should Mastodon threaten the corporate sphere of social media.
Stryder Notavi@fiercemilder One saving grace here is that while it might slow new sign ups on existing services, I can't see the people who've already bothered to get themselves an account migrating into the Google version.
Add that to the major virtue of federation being the ability to find a community where you best fit (the local timeline on the Gmail instance would be completely useless) and an attempt at Embrace, Extend, Extinguish could potentially backfire (Embrace, Exodus, Oopsie).
@fiercemilder Just adding a thought on this that's been bouncing around in my head the past couple of days.
Historically, a lot of people have been uncomfortable with the amount of data collected on them by Facebook / Google / Twitter but tolerated it because they don't know what to do about it.
When protecting the privacy of your data just requires moving to another instance - same UI, same experience, just less spying - that actually becomes a much easier sell than abandoning your entire social graph.