@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

@nmn @oblomov @kornel @daringfireball “Integration means they’ll still be able to connect with their friends”

Bingo. That’s what most people care about. Heck, that’s what a great many in the tech sphere care about. I’d love it if I could use Ice Cubes to chat with more people from my bow quite dispersed social graph and for Mastodon to be the sole place where I post. And if Meta’s thing became hideous, I could choose to block it *myself*.

@craiggrannell @oblomov @kornel @daringfireball This is also how you get more “normal” people to come over to Mastodon. They see all your posts coming from “mastodon.social” and they instantly get how federation works!

If they get annoyed by something that Meta does, they’ll try out Mastodon themselves. You could even tell them how nice Ice Cubes is!

@nmn @craiggrannell @kornel @daringfireball

Wishful thinking. Most people on larger Mastodon instances aren't even aware of the larger Fediverse. Even your insistence of talking about Mastodon is a strong indicator of that. What exactly make you think that it will be any different on Meta's server?

@nmn @craiggrannell @kornel @daringfireball

There's less than 2M of active users now. They won't influence any meaningful portion of the Meta users.

@oblomov @craiggrannell @kornel @daringfireball When federated, users can be influenced in either directions. But if you can communicate across the two platforms, the main reason for switching will be user experience, features etc.

If you defederate, you add the social graph to that calculus, and then Mastodon is at a clear disadvantage.