- The fact we have a flagship instance and that mastodon.social didn’t close signups ages ago is a huge part of the problem. They could have set a social precedent (large instances are a no-no) – they didn’t.

- When Threads federates, it will become the flagship instance.

- Eugen is basically handing the crown to Mark.

- The fact there is a crown to start with is a shortcoming of the federated model with instances that can scale indefinitely. (How else could things be done? See #SmallWeb)

…

- This is classic embrace, extend, extinguish.

Clearly, some of you folks don’t know your classics. If you need a refresher, see this:

https://beehaw.org/post/719121

- We know the business model of Meta (people farming / surveillance capitalism). We know it’s toxic. We know that any publicly-traded trillion-dollar corporation plays a zero-sum game. There is nothing, nothing that justifies giving them the benefit of the doubt except utter naïvety, verging on malicious negligence.

…

All that said, it feels like this ship has already sailed.

The only person who can really make an impact here is Eugen – by taking a principled stance against Meta – and that’s clearly not what he’s doing.

Without that, we are witnessing the normalisation of Meta/surveillance capitalism on the fediverse.

The only time you have any power over a trillion-dollar corporation/VC-backed startup is at the start & your only real leverage is making it socially unacceptable. And we’ve surrendered that.

@aral meta also uses IP, DNS, and HTTP. I’d like to see AP reach that level of ubiquity.

Federating doesn’t give meta any more access than they have right now to fedi data, does it?

@aral that’s where I have an issue though. Normal people do not sign up for truth social.

That’s an instance I would preemptively block.

Those are different people than those signing up for threads. Why pretend like they’re comparable?

Truth social may as well be GAB.