I don’t understand what Meta will gain from participating in the fediverse? Their ultimate goal is to make money of Threads and I just don’t see how encouraging an open federation will help them do it? Even 3Eing the fediverse will not do them much good as they already have sooo much traffic already that killing the fediverse will not make a serious change in their figures. But OTOH it does seem like Threads is net positive for the fediverse ATM. Even if all current denizens of the fediverse will block Threads, there is a large group of people that are exposed to the concept of “fediverse” for the fist time and some of them will want to learn more. This is a good thing. Anyway, I don’t know why they are doing it, but I’m cautiously glad they did it. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.
Squash the fediverse before it reaches critical mass.
Embrace, extend, extinguish
They can do that without federating. In the first 7 hours of Threads being open, they got 10 million users. There’s nothing additional they can do to “extinguish” the fediverse simply by being inside it.
Any fediverse users who prefer Threads are going to go there anyway - remember, you have to create a new account on each server already! And anyone who detests Meta is going to stay in the fediverse regardless. They’re here now, when the fediverse is minuscule. Nothing Meta can do is going to make the fediverse smaller.
They can flood the fediverse with mediocre content, ads via posts, and use both to scrape replies to create even more data about users. They can do this through existing instances In theory, but it would be far easier to federated and subscribe to instances to pull in the data to their own instance and being easier means it is more likely.
Making the fediverse bigger to harvest more data is a net loss for the fediverse.
If I had to guess, I would say that they want to scrape the data and use it for ad revenue. Not 100% sure but that would be my guess.
They can already do it by running a simple web scraper or running an anonymous instance that federates with everyone in disguise
but unless they are federated we won’t see the ads that they are going to disguise as legitimate user content.
Honestly I somewhat agree with this. I get the fear about Meta hurting the Fediverse by federating with it and then acting maliciously (XMPP), but I actually think it’s an “I’m not trapped in here with you…” type of situation. I would point to the example of AOL giving its users access to Usenet / the WWW – their hand was forced a little bit if they wanted to stay relevant, but I actually could see an argument that the community network was so compelling, and so outside the control of AOL if someone else wanted to compete with them on it, that that increased awareness of the world outside AOL was just one more factor that contributed to their downfall. They went from being their own wildly successful content provider to a captive audience, to being a bargain-basement ISP no different than thousands of others, to being irrelevant.
IDK what I would do if I were Meta, sitting on this aging flagship platform and trying to stay relevant with a clear and compelling exit door available for my users. Also, clearly I don’t have a multi-billion dollar company to argue for my own qualifications, but that said, I think what I would do in that situation is:
- Put serious effort and attention into making FB / Instagram / Whatsapp / etc a useful and rewarding platform for people to interact with each other
- Try to come up with genuinely compelling functionality and apps that are a reason for people to be on their platforms instead of somewhere else
What I wouldn’t do is:
- Change my name to Meta and hope no one ties “Meta” to “Facebook” mentally when they’re writing off Facebook as a obsolete and boomer-ized platform
- Do anything to help build awareness of the Fediverse in my user base
- Keep my actual platform 90% the same (notably the central place advertising has in dictating operations)
Edit: I am wrong (at least as far as the AOL parts). I was confusing AOL with some of the other walled-garden networks that granted their users web access as the web took off, but it was a web provider from the very beginning in addition to having its own little AOL services. Usenet access came later, but even that was pretty early in their history, well before their downfall. My analysis sounds compelling maybe but I think it’s 100% wrong now that I’ve looked a little more into AOL’s history. I looks to me now like they mostly got destroyed by broadband replacing dialup and being unable to pivot away from their dialup-centric roots.
Meta’s biggest business has been the manipulation of public opinion for years now. Their entry in the Fediverse is just their latest attempt at keep doing it. Privacy invasion and targeted ads are just tools that enable it for the former, and finance it for the later.
