1 point
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.
1 point
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.
