If they are allowed to join and become a large voice and eventually be like gmail to email, big enough to have control and provide the filtering people are already (quietly, carefully) asking for. All they need to do is to offer “spam filters” and a “personal feed” and we have Facebook 2.0 and they don’t even have to foot most of the server bills.

I think this is inevitable, in part because serving is expensive, and now that we might get significant spammer activity, complicated. Carrying the analogy on, though, I have a Proton account and I can give it out in real life just the way I would a Gmail account. There is no such possibility with Twitter. They could try and put up a hard wall once they have enough buy-in, but that didn't work so well for Yahoo mail, and hopefully it wouldn't for Threads.

So yeah, I expect I'll be on a little instance somewhere, and I'll still be able to participate in the equivalent of the Obama AMA hosted on one of the big ones.