@daringfireball Openness isn’t merely a protocol thing. It’s a delicate power balance.

When an entity larger than all other combined joins, it may become "too big to fail" and start dictating terms.

Gmail unilaterally dictates who can use SMTP. GitHub became the center of decentralised git. Systems tend to centralise.

@kornel @daringfireball Yes, and the way to fight with GMail isn’t to “block” gmail from other email services. That hurts the other email services, not Gmail.

Meta’s threads doesn’t *need* ActivityPub. It has Instagram’s far larger network. Blocking them from your mastodon instance only hurts you, not them. It resigns Mastodon to forever being that weird niche rather than part of the mainstream.

Integrate and use it to make yourself mainstream!

@oblomov @kornel @daringfireball Let’s say that’s true. It’s plausible that Meta wants to do the whole “embrace, extend, extinguish” thing.

Defederating them early won’t fix anything. Meta has a huge user base. Threads doesn’t need AP to “bootstrap” content.

It will either steal users from Mastodon, or it won’t. De-federating will incentive more users to switch away from Mastodon. Integrating will let them stay because of the integration.

@oblomov @kornel @daringfireball On the other hand. Meta could bring a HUGE amount of awareness about AP and Mastodon and it could lead to a large number of people joining, if only to check things out.

Some users might even like the experience on Mastodon better. Ivory, Mona, Ice Cubes, Elk are all great apps which are likely much nicer to use than whatever Threads will be.

Integration will mean they’ll still be able to connect with their friends

@oblomov @kornel @daringfireball Mobile killed xmpp not Google or Facebook.

If anything Gmail and Facebook kelp Xmpp alive a few extra years.

@nmn @kornel @daringfireball

Bullshit. XMPP has developed extensions to make it mobile-ready, extensions that Google and Facebook *refused to implement*. Also XMPP is still “alive” in products like WhatsApp (is that mobile-ready enough for you?). But not as a federation protocol allowing people to connect across networks. Do you see the pattern here?

@oblomov @nmn @kornel @daringfireball Yes, there were definitely multiprotocol chat clients on Microsoft's PocketPC and Nokia's Symbian at the time, and lots of Java clients. XMPP Servers were also easy to set up and host compared to Mastodon & co.
I didn't understand why they fizzled out until I made sense of the "kiss of death" adoption by Google.

EDIT: a tpyo :)
EDIT: a tpyo :)