Basically every single invocation of “embrace, extend and extinguish” is a borderline fallacy that depends on an oversimplified world view.
XMPP/Jabber is even “funnier” because instant messaging as a whole is basically dead in favor of SMS and phone apps. The closest we get on that front is imessage and even that is mostly a US obsession.
Basically every “Oh mah gawdz, EEE is coming for us” article comes from a place of mass ignorance, at best.
As for Threads? I suspect that will eat Mastodon’s lunch. Because it already is. People love giving Facebook even more information and already have their favorite usernames from instagram. Whereas they will never stop bitching about how hard it is to sign up for Mastodon.
And… that is fine. Mastodon is not twitter. It is better. A lot better.
That said? I wouldn’t mind having access to Threads content. And I think there is a lot of room to use Matsodon/federation as a way for advertisers to take their power back, as it were, by controlling their own instances and being able to immediately cut off The Emerald Apartheid when he starts talking about The Jews again. But, if I ever do see a significant benefit to this, I can migrate to an instance that federates or even start my own. Rather than insisting that the ones I have accounts on do what I want.
I’d argue the phone apps are instant messaging and I’m a little surprised none of the previously-dominant PC-based IM apps made the transition successfully. Most of the ones currently popular do have web or native PC options though.
I think we’re more likely to see users move from Threads to Mastodon than the other direction. Ideally, we’ll be able to offer a more compelling pitch than just “not corporate”.
I think we’re more likely to see users move from Threads to Mastodon than the other direction.
I keep seeing people say things like this, but it’s just naive. Meta isn’t spending billions of dollars just to give their captive audience an offramp.
I’m not sure what Meta’s goal is with adding federation to Threads. Some options include:
- Preempting government scrutiny for monopolistic practices
- Gaining a competitive advantage against Xitter/Bluesky/etc…
- Giving Threads users access to more people/content
As for why I think the flow of users is likely to be away from Threads:
- People who already actively use Mastodon and the like tend to be fairly technically sophisticated and anti-corporate. Not many of those will switch to a Meta product when they can reach the same audience without it.
- Most people who joined Threads got there via Instagram. Those sorts of mainstream users mostly haven’t been exposed to decentralized, non-corporate social media. The added exposure of seeing it from Threads is more marketing than these open source projects could ever hope to buy.
Regardless of how you classify them, nobody was ever going to figure out how to sideload a jabber client onto their flip phones or iphone 1 or blackberries.
And that is kind of the thing. Maybe Google got a larger market share of the IM market (I assume AIM was still dominant in the US and ICQ in the rest of the world) by using XMPP but better. But the market got wiped out by SMS and imessage and now is mostly shared between (depending on your country) whatsapp, line, and the imessage. … And I still use Hangouts.
Even if XMPP had been dominant on PC (which is not at all what EEE is about but…), it would not have survived as people shifted away from sitting at a computer and typing and moved toward stopping in the middle of the sidewalk and using their thumbs on a phone screen.
