this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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Aside from the "moral" argument, can someone ELI5 what harm can a federated threads.net do on other users (like me) and/or instances?
the general strategie is called "embrace, extend, extinguish". This strat is the reason, why everyone uses MS Office today
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
that reminds me of Apple with iMessage
A failed messaging system that nobody in the world uses except for the Americans?
How sweet.
Well, yes, I think that's the one.
I think you upset the americans 😆
I'm not American and I still downvoted the asshole. Sorry. Assholes.
I'm not following... who is american and who is an asshole
That's absolutely in your right to do so.
Would you mind if I ask you what did I say that's considered an asshole move?
As opposed to Threads stealing all brands companies and users anyway?
There’s still advantages to a fediverse and ways to defend against “embrace extend extinguish” if you plan ahead.
We can’t complain about proprietary networks if we don’t allow others to join our own open ones.
The extend-phase is when people migrate to threads, who would have stayed otherwise.
And why would you expect there to be many such people? I’d assume the intersection of people who like the Fediverse and people who like proprietary social media to be pretty small.
Why are people not allowed to do that if they want to?
You think groups that came here largely fleeing Reddit and Twitter are going to be tempted to go to threads? I doubt it very heavily. Threads is more likely to loose people to here if anything.
It's not necessarily about a threat to instances or users. It's more an issue with how Meta could potentially hijack the protocol the whole thing is built on, and do damage in the long run. There's a write up here on how similar things have happened in the past;
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is what it's about, right here. I wish more people would understand this. This is not some loose anti-coporate sentiment or senseless alarm sounding. We have example after example of how corporations like Meta, Microsoft, and Google leverage their power to consume and destroy. To say "we just need to be proactive about stopping them" is naive. We've said that so many times, and every time we've lost.
The only way to win is not to play their game. We can't let them in in the first place.
Edit: a word
You should look into Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. I think the biggest fear is that they have so many users that they will just flood all instances with their stuff. This can, in time, lead to a situation where they can defederate from everything else and bring a lot of people with them, since most of the content will have come from Threads.
I feel though that if they were going to do that they should have done that from the beginning. A lot of the other instances now they kind of solidified themselves as big players. It would have been easy to just use Threads at the start but people have put the effort into creating accounts on other platforms now, I can't see them going back what would be the point it would be more of it again.
No, you need some fire before you can extinguish.
So that plan at this point seems to be as far as I can understand it to be to register to a service wherever every single other user will be federate from them.
I'm sure that will work brilliantly.
You understand that the entire fediverse is a rounding error against Meta's user base, right?
No one's going to drop thir instance to use Meta. The whole reason that most of the people are here is because they don't trust the big sites.
You are missing the point. And by this point I'm pretty sure you're doing so wilfully.
They can absorb large numbers of users and communities and after a while close themselves to the outside. Meaning that once people "need" those communities they'll have no chance other than go threads.
threads hab more users than fediverse on one instance
is cause centralization
I got a number of answers that sound very weak to me, and basically point to a "fail" of the fediverse in its own nature if threads joins. Kind of disappointing.
To me, the key idea of the fediverse is that it's federated and should work as a whole, no matter who joins. Most of the answers below support the opposite. They are basically saying that the fediverse should stay within the "fediverse", which is exactly what non-federated social media are doing. Meh.
Competition and success. They are just paranoid that it'll be successful and they can't control where the project goes without including the majority of users and then developers.