I think defederating Threads is a huge missed opportunity for Mastodon to grow.
Imagine interacting with their users and letting them know that: you scroll posts without ads, your timeline is in chronological order, your client doesnāt spy on you, you only see what you want and no other content is pushed to your timeline, etcā¦
if I was a Threads users, I would move to Mastodon as soon as I find out š
@donhawkins
That's the thing. When they first announced how many people had signed up, it was 10 million. That was more than makes up the entire Fediverse right now. The second number was 30 million, tripling that.
So why are they even considering federating?
Why are they even considering exposing their userbase to people who haven't bought into their BS hook line and sinker?
@donhawkins
Do they think they will get many converts over when most of us intentionally left traditional social media because of their bullshit?
No of course they don't.
They are trying to take over where Twitter has faultered. Hooking into the wave of people jumping ship is a way forward...something no other traditional media has done. Their motivations are unclear right now...so it's wise to be cautious. That's still why I like the wait and see attitude Fosstodon has.
@thundergod97 @donhawkins I think it's a play at avoiding antitrust and other forms of regulatory action.
By federating they can say "See we support an Open Internet and competition" even if only at a surface level. The vast majority will never switch once they join threads and those of us that wouldn't join are still exposed to their data collection by proxy unless we want to be siloed into irrelevance. Think about how Gmail dominates email despite email being federated.
@donhawkins @thundergod97 The point I was making was that Gmail makes up the vast majority of email accounts globally, and cutting off all Gmail users from communicating with you would make life impossibly difficult.
Similarly, Federating Threads will result in the majority of users, content, and discussions occurring on the Threads instance, making it so any instance defederates from it will find themselves without a sufficient amount of content/discussion to keep people on the platform.
@donhawkins @thundergod97 I suppose that's possible, but that would require billions of people to ditch Google and I just don't see that happening. 1/8th of the global population uses Gmail. Those things only had a tiny fraction of a percentage of the number of users.
I should probably hedge what I'm saying here with "I don't see that happening unless Elon Musk acquires Google or something else catastrophic occurs like Google being banned from the EU entirely."
Do u recall when Wells Fargo Bank was in the news for signing up their existing clients for new accts that they never asked for, and got their wrists slapped for a few Million$? Yeah well, the Threads sign-up count turns out to be sorta like that. Ya know, kindda like a crowd estimate for a tRump rally too. The laws of nature say that for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. My own will be to delete my Instagram altogether. Just like I did w/FB long ago.
Andrea Grandi š¦
Thor
Don Hawkins - W7DAH
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