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Mastodon's Founder & CEO Gives His Thoughts on Meta's Threads
(blog.joinmastodon.org)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Honestly, I'm kind of bummed that so many people are stomping their feet and saying they don't want the big guy to find their little cabin in the woods.
If mas.to -- where I signed up for Mastodon -- defederates Threads, I'm just going to lose access to the vast population that will simply use that easiest means of joining the Fediverse.
Defederating is just going to chase droves of people off independent servers and into the arms of Zuck.
You've completely missed the point. It's not that Facebook (and by extension, their users) will connect to Mastodon, it's that they will take over Mastodon, seizing all control for themselves, and coopting the existing userbase.
Right now it's a separate product. Just like people know that Twitter is not Mastodon, Threads isn't either. If you want to reach Twitter users, you get a Twitter account. If you want to reach Mastodon users, you get a Mastodon account. Facebook is planning to market themselves as the best way to enter the Mastodon ecosystem. Before long, they will be the absolute dominant server. Then they will have control, because defederation is a weapon they can wield and not vice-versa.
This is not theoretical, either. Google did the EXACT same thing back with Google Talk and the XMPP protocol. And we know how Facebook operates, so we know that this will eventually happen. The only way to stop it is before it starts - Facebook users need to be unhappy (at Facebook) that they can't reach Mastodon users, so that defederation remains their own problem.
(Separately, I agree with you that Lemmy needs to become more accessible to the common user. But simply handing it all over to someone as awful as Zuck is not the way)
It’s going to be an arms race to make sure free software provides a better service than Threads does, and that people know about it. We can’t be satisfied with unpolished diy software for nerds any more.
This might be a very pessimistic take, but I strongly feel like any average Joe will rather pick the Meta/big corp alternative to the FOSS one. The fact that Meta's got a reputation for Facebook and Instagram while Mastodon's got a reputation for being confusing is... very not promising. Basically I feel like this is a lost race already. Hope it's just me.
Lol Meta has a reputation for stealing data, denying genocide, platforming bigots, and interfering in elections. The idea that the name Facebook wasn't so toxic that one of the largest tech companies did a massive rebranding in the wake of major scandal (see threatening democracy) is a fantasy.