There are literally, not exaggerating, over one billion Instagram accounts in existence. It's self-evidently not the case that they have just silently registered everybody a Threads account and are counting those numbers.

Meta is categorically evil, but the pretty obvious gain from federation is the same as it is federating with anything else: content. Threads has people posting on it, some of those people say interesting things ... the end.

That's not to say that outweighs the downsides, like some of that content will also undoubtedly be hateful bigoted trash, and the moderation load of suddenly dealing with an order of magnitude more posts will be a huge strain on fediverse admins who choose to federate, but there's undeniably something to gain.

Definitely. Meta is studiously only sharing the number of accounts registered. We have no idea how many of those are active. If we go with the old 1-9-90 rule, only about 10 million of those 100 million will become active users. Although, the rule obviously isn't a universal constant. On the fediverse, for example, it's closer to ⅓ of registered users that are active.

This is untrue. Threads accounts are reserved for the matching Instagram user, but those users have to actually choose for that account to be opened. If all Instagram accounts were auto-converted to Threads accounts there'd be over 1 billion Threads accounts. The 100 million Threads users are all people who have specifically opted to have a Threads account.

In fairness, I think we might already be the rest who don't matter. Threads has just passed 100 million users in like three days. The entire fediverse, in about ten years (it's tough to pin down an exact start date because "When did it become the fediverse?"), has accrued around 12 million users, of which less than 4 million are active. There's any number of things Meta might want, but I don't think greater access to 4 million geeks is at the top of their list.

I do think the embrace, extend, extinguish concerns have some merit. Meta isn't threatened by the fediverse now, but maybe they do want to kill it before it becomes a problem. In the short term, though, we're not overtaking Threads. Personally, I think another plausible theory is that Threads is using ActivityPub to demonstrate that they're not running a monopoly or gatekeeping control of social media (which the EU's new Digital Markets Act now regulates) by pointing to the fediverse--which will soon also include direct competitors Tumblr--and saying "See, we're all on equal footing! We don't control social media! Look over there at those 4 million geeks and whatever number of Tumblr users."

It comes from Fortune, they can't conceive of something that's not a business.

Hard to tell. It's been in decline since January though, so some of it is just Twitter being a place people want to be less and less.

Defederation and the Dutch

Here's the graph, as posted by CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince:

Twitter DNS rankings over time, Jan-Jul 2023