@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?

@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."