Yeah, I'm cautiously optimistic that if they do truly join the fediverse, we'll finally have our real twitter replacement (aka relatively community friendly tech that's accessible to people who don't want to hear the word instance, AND the big benefit that basically everybody already has an instagram account). I haven't used twitter since the musk takeover, but a lot of people whose opinions and reporting I care about still do. Most of them never bothered with the migration to mastodon, although lots of them are on bluesky. I'm hoping that the easy of availability of Threads gets them over there, and that the fediverse connection doesn't take too long so I can start to interact with them via Mastodon without having to agree to all those permissions. Sorry, kinda lost the plot there.

I think the real concern should be that they'll make it really easy to get on board with, until almost nobody is creating accounts directly with federated instances. Once they have enough penetration, they'll defederate and force people to choose; them or the Fediverse.