@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!

@Andres @kornel @daringfireball Did you read what I wrote? I never said that Gmail makes a protocol mainstream. I said that if a big actor becomes a threat to a protocol, cutting them off is counter productive.

You have to build better experiences. Convince people to switch and use the fact that your compatible with said big service to help your arguments.

If you cut them off, you lose, because they have the money and marketing.

@Andres @kornel @daringfireball Threads won’t have 2.36 Billion people when it launches. It’ll ramp up like any other service.

You may think that you can prevent them from taking off if you de-federate early, but they don’t need ActivityPub to succeed.

The Fediverse on the other hand can use the integration to lure people away from Meta and to Mastodon, Pixelfed etc.

If they’re a bad actor after launch, by all means, take action.