https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Many of us do not trust Facebook and anything it is associated with or swallows up.
EDIT:
"Instagram head Adam Mosseri said "
““Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as @[email protected].””
“We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming,” he said.
“If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
I have done a little bit of reading but I’m still not sure what the issue is. Is it that Threads will take over and defacto become the entire Fediverse? Because I think that would happen whether or not Mastoson/Lemmy instances choose to defederate. Is privacy the concern, and if so, wouldn’t it only affect people using Threads?
For me it’s mostly because massive corporations love to destroy any possible competition. It has happened repeatedly in history. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I came to lemmy because I hate all those guys and I don’t want one coming in and destroying it. Meta has absolutely no incentive to help the fediverse. He is here for the free code, to fuck with Elon, and destroy some competition. That’s it. Don’t let him.
Read up on EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish).
There are multiple concerns:
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The basic principals of Federation is “killed” as Threads will try and bait people on ONLY using their platform. For example that they wont even show any posts/comments from others but in reverse they spam other posts with their posts and comments.
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There will be a huge increase of users like multiple million users. With it that type of users who want to share literally every opinion. The karen, twitter “Free Speech” type. It will bring much hate to the fediverse.
Personally the fediverses goal is to have smaller instances and not a big boy that wants everything.
And they would try and monetize and advertise in the fediverse.
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I also don’t understand the issue. I’m against meta / twitter / reddit (hence my account here), but how does Threads bring about a degraded experience in any way for lemmy.world users? I feel like if anything this is a great way to get more people comfortable with the concept of the fediverse and push them one step closer to breaking away from the traditional social media companies. So far all I’ve been able to see is “Meta bad, defederate”.
“…but how does Threads bring about a degraded experience in any way for lemmy.world users?”
Because our feed will be full of the kind of stuff that people will be posting on Threads, complete with whatever boosting algorithm Meta chooses to use on there. That’s not why I’m here. If I wanted a heavily tilted feed of whatever Meta thinks I should see, I’d be there.
Algorithm wouldn’t work well because the whole value to Meta is that it’s curated per user. You can’t do that here. It’d need to be one algorithm for the entire world. So it’ll be very limited at most. Plus they’d have to break the spec to even cause it to happen. At most it’ll be secondary affect in that Thread users upvote it. But even then, if it’s a poor experience, then defederation would be imminent. I’m just against the whole idea of being upset it isn’t happening before we have any remote idea of how it works out.
I like your optimism, but Meta is a relentless cancer and FOSS is its enemy. It won’t sit idly by while ideas of ad-free alternatives grow in its users minds. Nothing good can come from Meta’s mingling with non-profit competition.
The only silver lining is how incompetent these corporations have been lately. Fingers crossed, they’ll fuck up whatever nefarious shit they have planned, and the fediverse can carry on in some state when they try to pull the rug - at the very least for those who value its ideals over user count, but hopefully also still as a viable and active alternative.
Here’s an accessible summary of a few historical examples of why people don’t want corporations adopting their open source platforms: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
They will be hovering up your data and in a while they’ll EEE this place to corporate death.
They can already hoover up all your data. Fediverse data is by design very public.
EEE isn’t a verb. It’s a type of attack. Without defining how they possibly could, it’s mostly FUD. And they already can access your data regardless whether they are defederated from your instance or not. Defederation means you don’t see them, not that they don’t see you.
One concern would be:
- Say Lemmy/kbin grows organically to 1 million users.
- Threads federates, with 100 million users
Do you want these users flooding Lemmy? I don’t want to be biased at the theoretical type of user on Threads, though if the right wingers/trolls/extremists migrate to Threads because they think it’s “more open” then that may be an issue. If it’s full of soccer moms posting pictures of their kids, or karens complaining about everything, that may be an issue.
Multiculturalism is great, I want to hear new ideas, though some areas are breeding grounds for lower-think, it seems. This probably sounds prejudiced or elitist.
I want to talk to the vanguard people who take the risk and are openminded and come to lemmy, not necessarily the “lemmings” who join facebook because they love facebook and don’t want to, or can’t, delve deeper into why facebook is one of the worst forces in media at the moment.
I am not prejudiced (I hope) against “regular people” and “soccer moms”, though think that if 10 million soccer moms came here, the discussions may not be as… interesting, as they are.
Also, I don’t know what lemmy instances will think about downloading masses of data from threads.
I think this will be pretty manageable by finding and using communities that are well-run and have explicit rules and standards of behavior that are enforced. If a community is explicitly meant for serious conversations about, I dunno, music theory, that is enforceable, and if Suburban Subaru Sarah actually wants to join in on that, all the better, but pics of her kid’s soccer game will belong in a different space, just as much as pics of some nerd’s Warcraft raid do too.
Sure. However, you can’t trust meta, so anything that is done I hope has several failbacks and get-out clauses.
Ultimately, there is simply no mechanism for Meta to interfere with a community that it doesn’t federate with. I can definitely see a bit of a split developing between Meta and non-Meta instances, but beyond that, there’s really not much to worry about
This is such a bad analysis of that situation. You are relying on it too much. I’ve pointed it out in other replies to your countless posting of this link with no context.
I donate money to this platform because I want an open and free internet. I want that for anyone who wants to partake. I don’t want extremists, sure - but I think the “soccer moms” you are referring to are really just your average internet consumer. If we don’t agree on that, that’s fine - I’m happy to move to an instance that’s not as restrictive. I think that’s the beauty of the fediverse. I think it’s ironic when you talk about wanting open minded people to join the instance though lol.
I have nothing against “soccer moms”, I just don’t want to see endless photos of their kids, which may be ironic since there’s shitposting on all social networks. Perhaps we’d be able to ignore those communities, however it’ll leak over to other communities.
It seemed to be “fine” when “those” sorts of “regular folk” stuck to facebook for their fix of sharing their lives.
Anyway, this aspect isn’t the main point, I’d say - it’s that one cannot trust facebook, and if they want to federate, it cannot be good for us.
Personally I don’t care about the soccer moms, my main concern is all the problems that come with being a mainstream social media platform. Threads threatens to overwhelm the content being generated with all those problems where your Lemmy feed is just going to represent Instagram etc again. Screw that.
That’s exactly what I’m talking about when using the generic “soccer moms” - mainstream twitter/facebook posts.
I’m probably confusing myself as I have nothing against “normal people”, and want them to discus sthings, and I’m sure there could be a lot of good discussions that could be had with “normal people”, though being drowned by mainstream media posts is the main issue, as you say.
And if that experience ends up being negative, instances can choose to defederate. Many admins just want to see if it will actually be a problem. If admins choose to solve a problem that doesn’t exist yet, let them. But let’s not protest instances and destroy communities over possibly nothing just because the admin is curious to see what happens.
I think it would be easy enough to unsubscribe to the EndlessMoppets community and only subscribe to communities that curate Moppetless posts.
As far as leaking over goes, I never had a problem with EndlessMoppets leaking into any of the subs I did subscribe to over on Reddit.
And for what it’s worth Lemmy is not encrypted so it would be silly to think Meta isn’t already vacuuming up all this content already.
Because this is reminiscent of what happened with XMPP. In the old days you had many closed source protocols for instant messaging. Then XMPP came along and started gaining steam. At that point, major platforms started using it, with everything federated. Someone with Google could talk to someone on Facebook and with someone on myown.sillyserver.net. Everything was going great. But obviously the majority of people went with the easy option to go with Facebook or Google, meaning you still had a federated network on the paper, but with a few actors weighing way more than most.
Obviously at that point, they slowly defederated, preventing their customers from talking to their contacts on other platforms. But most of their contacts where on the same platform, so the cost of migrating was higher. That’s how the federation ended. XMPP still exists, and was actually used by WhatsApp in a non federated way, but it is the shell of itself with not a lot of people using it.
A social network strength is in its number. Accepting Meta into Fediverse creates a very real risk that they will try an embrace and extinguish strategy and in the end you will have most people on Meta and just a niche of people on Lemmy/Mastodon, similar to how it was a few months ago.
The goal of the fediverse is to find the proper balance between having multiple platforms big enough so that moderation and technical management can be done by knowledgeable people, but small enough that they cannot decide willy nilly to defederated. Having Meta in the fediverse would very probably break that balance.
XMPP died because of competition. Everyone is forgetting everyone said Google was losing the chat wars with Apple and that’s why Google repeatedly released new systems. Google left XMPP and that isn’t why XMPP failed. It failed because virtually everyone had either an Apple account or Android account. So they all had a chat account already. They “destroyed” XMPP the same way Blackberry hurt XMPP at the time as well. XMPP would be just as relevant if Google never federated with it.
FB has proven time and again that they don’t care to moderate their spaces, and they increase engagement by presenting the most toxic and angering things to you. Community groups in particular are absolutely hideous on there, full of people angry at the (insert minority group) walking down the street. I don’t want that in my life again, and I don’t want it infecting lemmy. If I did want to engage with that type of content, I’d make an account on Threads.
That said, I’m not out here making demands of our admin and moderators right now. They’re busy just keeping this place running. The threads situation won’t be going away tomorrow, so it can wait a hot minute.
It’s a combination of EEE (Engage, Enhance, Extinguish) tactics, as well as toxicity overload. Meta are notorious for manipulating their viewers. Threads will rapidly devolve into rage bait, since this gives maximum engagement. They will use us to dilute the resultant toxicity. Once it’s established, even de-federating might not be enough. It could generate a locust like influx of toxic new members. The federation doesn’t have the community robustness to absorb that sort of hit right now.
Honestly, I feel like u/ruud is gonna see these comments and keep Zuck out of things. He seems like he cares about what’s going on up in here.
If they are going to block it, I would have thought they have decided that already, though seems like mastodon’s head agreed - how much was he paid, I wonder.
Mastodon’s head can’t choose who individual instances federate with. I think he’s in charge of like, one? How many people in this thread have already shown they have no clue how federation works?
Yes, that is why I’m asking the admins of lemmy.world if they are going to block it.
Also, this is the largest mastrodon server that is likely federating with threads, so not a small deal.
I don’t see what people are afraid of. Lemmy.world can do what it wishes, but I honestly don’t see where the fear comes in. At the very least just mark it invisible. Let those other users see what other alternatives are out there.
What problem are you trying to fix by blocking them before even seeing what it’s like (without using some vague notions)?
Will it even natively federate with this format? Just as Mastodon doesn’t default to trying to display posts in its feed and Kbin doesn’t by default show Mastodon or PixelFed, etc. You might be worrying over nothing.
Your server federated with Mastodon instances. I’m assuming you aren’t inundated with Mastodon posts.
As long as lemmy.world blocks it, it’s not an issue - for us anyway, I hope. Though meta are devious - you need to be watchful.
Have you watched how growth-at-all-costs tech companies behave? They are ruthless. Nothing good can come from them joining.
Their joining inti the fediverse is not influenced by a server preemptively defederating a source that isn’t even live yet. I don’t truly care who defederates who, but forcing them to do so early doesn’t make sense. If it’s truly as bad as you say, they’ll be defederated fairly quickly. I just don’t like folks literally causing infighting simply because some admins are fairly level headed.
I haven’t seen infighting so much as just active discussions on the merit or lack thereof of joining hands with a known bad actor like Meta.
Mastodon is much more centralised than Lemmy though, so it’s still a big deal
No, it isn’t. What are you talking about? Do you even understand the difference between Lemmy and Lemmy.world at this point? Do you understand what I mean when I tell you I don’t use Lemmy?
Mastodon.social is much bigger than the other instances and it’s headed by the devs (just like kbin.social). This is different from Lemmy, where the spread is more even and the devs purposely don’t want to have the largest instance. Have a good day.
That’s not what centralized means, nor does it actually affect anything others mentioned. So, good day to you as well I suppose.
“centralized” and “decentralized” are a spectrum, not absolutes. Mastodon might be decentralized in theory but if everyone uses a single instance then it’s centralized in practice. That isn’t the case right now, but it’s also not entirely not the case, either. Same is true for lemmy
“Anyone who disagrees with me has clearly been bribed”.
I think it is not-naive to assume that the ridiculously wealthy Meta, which is known to purchase smaller companies, has met with the much smaller mastodon and offered them money. It may be cynical, however it is not-naive.
It’s naive to think they’d actually care that much especially since it would hurt them a whole lot more of that info got out. They gain nothing. With the number of level headed people just claiming wait and see is clear that it’s a very widespread concept. There’s no need to pay anyone. It’s simply the principle concept behind the fediverse. It’s admins following the actual principle of the fediverse. They’ll defederate once there’s an actual concrete reason and not a bunch of FUD instead.
I can’t even interact on lemmy.world with my mastodon.world account. Is it really worth worrying about Thread accounts being able to interact here?
I have a feeling Thread is never going to bother with ActivityPub anyway. I suspect the threat was only ever a hedge in case Thread wasn’t as wildly successful on launch as it turned out to be.
"Instagram head Adam Mosseri said "
““Soon, you’ll be able to follow and interact with people on other fediverse platforms, such as Mastodon. They can also find people on Threads using full usernames, such as @[email protected].””
“We’re committed to building support for ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon, into this app. We weren’t able to finish it for launch given a number of complications that come along with a decentralized network, but it’s coming,” he said.
“If you’re wondering why this matters, here’s a reason: you may one day end up leaving Threads, or, hopefully not, end up de-platformed. If that ever happens, you should be able to take your audience with you to another server. Being open can enable that.”
I’ve seen the quote but not sure how it applies to what I said.
Just because they add ActivityPub support doesn’t mean it will work with Lemmy. That was why I gave the example of Mastodon.world not working with Lemmy.world.
And that quote was from before the launch which is what spurred the second part of my comment.
Again. You’re replying with a comment/link that does not address any of the points I made.
They provided little in the way of extra elaboration but that link explains a very good reason to be suspicious of corporations and hesitant to add them to any open platform. That directly speaks to your original question of why should you be concerned. I understand that the format of lemmy and threads aren’t entirely compatible and if that’s the case, then there is no need to federate with them as federation can only cause issues and provide no benefit.
That article is FUD. Apple hurt XMPP just as much by never joining it and offering a messaging system within their own ecosystem so folks had no reason to create a second account. XMPP would have been harmed by competition just as much if Google didn’t join it. It was competition that killed it. Not that they had joined.
The article isn’t FUD. FUD is a propaganda tactic. This is a recounting of events from the perspective of an insider. Just because it may give cause to have uncertainty or doubt or hell, even fear, doesn’t mean it is a propaganda piece. And especially knowing how tech giants behave towards any and all competition this is really just a textbook retelling of one of the many events that fall into this same pattern.
I think it really depends how big the fediverse becomes. If it becomes popular enough that Meta are missing out on that rich, creamy data mining then you bet they’ll do what ever they can to destroy other instances and the fediverse in general.
To me it’s simple. If Zuck has a part in this, I will find somewhere else to go.
Yes. They have destroyed enough internet they shouldn’t allowed to touch this.
I came here specifically to avoid meta and reddit
Same. If Meta isn’t chased away, I’m leaving the Fediverse. Once I ripped the reddit bandaid off, my loyalty to any one site evaporated. I won’t feel a thing if I need to find somewhere else to go.
Yup, all that matters is doomscrolling and shitposts, and we can all get our fill of content without any corporate fuckers fucking this shit the fuck up.
Also, Fuck spez and fuck Reddit.
Save some fucking for Ajit Pai while we’re at it.
Gladly, thanks for the reminder.
If this instance doesn’t defederate from Threads, I’m sure plenty of others will. And you can always host your own and lose very little functionality. That’s the entire point of the fediverse. Tying your view of the fediverse to one single instance is kind of missing the point.
My concern is the embrace, extend, extinguish method that will ruin the Fediverse regardless of the number of instances, as big tech giants are so adept at doing. I don’t have an optimistic outlook here. Meta is here for a reason, and they aren’t going to just go away now that their foot is in the door.
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I don’t see how they can accomplish that though. They can’t really bring any value other than lower barrier of entry to users. They’re exposed to other instances and everyone can point out what they’re giving up when they can literally lose nothing by switching to a different instance.
Everyone read one article on ebrace, extend and extinguish and now they’re experts on the subject matter
For all I see is that the biggest threat Threads brings to us is that by federating with them you’re going to receive a shit ton of facebook quality content
But you could just change to whatever instance isn’t federated with them. There will be many, I expect.
I would be even more disillusioned and disappointed than I currently am, I will admit it.
There are always instances and apps that will block them for you. That’s the beauty of interoperability.
dude exactly
hold your horses guys. But seriously, lets not put too much pressure on the Admins, they’re doing a fine job maintaining the servers. I guess we wait how Meta will federate and let the admins take time to decide.
Agreed and I wish the lemmy.world admins would respect their users and announce their intentions for federating with meta. Its pretty irresponsible they they have not said anything so far.
If they do I will delete my lemmy.world account and seek a clean instance of just leave Lemmy all together.
Reddit was bad, meta is 1m times worse.
If we don’t defederate from the outset I’m just gonna join another instance that did. I didn’t sign up for Lemmy because I wanted fucking twitter.
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I actually would prefer .world not block Facebook’s Threads. I have some accounts on other instances that will be blocking them, so I can switch to those if it becomes an issue.
In any case, I think it’s a tough decision and I do like .world simply because of how open it is.
I support either decision. I only just got here damn it lol
federation with meta will bring nothing but evil into our niche little corner of the net and i am not for it.
I have some mixed feelings about this
But (and don’t hate me for this) If theads joins the fediverse it could actually bring a large user base over
And ofcourse once meta gets greedy the fediverse should do what it’s designed for and prevent any large company from owning the fediverse
It could also convince a decent portion of the threads userbase to move over to lemmy or mastodon much easier then they would of been able to in the past since they will already be so close
Tl;Dr Allow meta into the fediverse but if it’s shit then defederate them aka do what this system was designed for
I would normally agree with you. However, Facebook is notorious for user manipulation. I suspect they are trying to use the larger federated community to stabilise their own. They know they get maximum engagement out of rage baiting etc. Unfortunately, this also tends to turn the community toxic. If the threads community is diluted down by the fediverse, then they can maximize their milking of threads without killing the golden goose.
Unfortunately for us, things will flow both ways. That toxicity will flow into the fediverse. While the system is designed to deal with this, it can only deal with so much. If we give them their fix, then take it away later, by de-federating, there’s nothing to stop them jumping ship to us. That sounds great, until they bring the mentalties from the toxic community that meta created over to us. We don’t have the numbers, or history yet to cope and stabilise that sort of influx.
Meta is like gangrene, by the time you realise how serious it is, it’s spread everywhere and you’re already screwed. The only viable response is to amputate early to protect the rest.
That’s fair meta do be pretty shit
I don’t want them commercializing the space. I feel as though we came here to get away from that. I fear an EEE tactic at worst, ads possibly showing in my feed at the least. But its not like we can’t defederate after launch if it is terrible.
There’s no way to inject ads into your feed, except possibly by the admin of your own instance. Meta, or any other actor, could hypothetically use a bunch of bots to promote regular posts that are secretly ads throughout the Fediverse, but that would lead to them getting defederated very quickly by everyone else.
Zucc-Gate-2023
Isn’t Threads federating with Mastodon, not Lemmy?
The way the fediverse works is that Mastodon Lemmy Peertube Pixelfed and others all implement the ActivityPub protocol. So if Threads does as well, they will be visible from everywhere. (Example: you can post to lemmy from mastodon and vice versa)
There is “one” fediverse. Any instance using ActivityPub can talk to any other instance using ActivityPub for the most part. Depending on details, you may get a degraded experience (like mastodon trying to view Kbin wouldn’t work super well). Honestly, there probably won’t be too much federation between Lemmy/Kbin instances and Threads. They’re not very similar in use.
Mastodon and Lemmy are linked (you can see replies form mastodon users and posts), and if threads joins then we are all linked.
Don’t federate with Meta, please
i really hope we keep conglomerate out of the fediverse… they will commercialize it.
That not really how the fediverse works. A server can defederate them, but there’s no way to keep them out of the fediverse as a whole. It’s somewhat antithetical to the core purpose behind the fediverse anyway. They can’t commercialize your instance.
I think most people believe that defederating means your messages stop going to Facebook when infact it’s the other way around. Only way to prevent Facebook from seeing what you’re posting here is if they defederate with us which probably is easy to accomplish by having content on your instance that’s agains Facebook’s terms of service and that you refuse to take it down even if they threaten to defederate.
What defederating (if we do it) does achieve however is that it removes all Threads content from our communities which probably isn’t a bad thing either
Threads has 60 million users in 1 day, the fediverse has 12 million over years of growth.
We’d be keeping ourselves out of Threads, not the other way around.
They can keep their 60 million threads, most of that is complete trash anyway.
That 60 million includes the vast majority of people’s actual real-life friends and family.
I know “les normies suck lulz” is a popular sentiment here, but I don’t think constantly harping on how much we hate the average person and find them to be trash is a particularly good way to create a positive and welcoming community.
I don’t hate anybody but I do hate their random bad takes and opinions on things and I don’t care about their families either.
I hate Lindsey de Fournier but she knows what she did. Pretty much everyone else is cool.
This issue is less about accepting them, and more about preventing Meta and their scummy practices. I don’t want their hateful algorithms involved here. I don’t want their growth-at-all-costs mindset that will damage things more than any of their content will help. Whether the content has any value is a matter of opinion but my issue with this is that there are platforms for that kind of content already. If you want and enjoy it, go there. The fediverse so far doesn’t have the corporate evils permeating it, and very few communities online get to say that. No good can come from allowing meta in the door, and inevitably it will kill the fediverse in some form or fashion. People like to say “oh we can defederate later”. Later? When it is harder because now you have people hooked to the “content” coming from there? No, it’s best to never open the door in the first place.
Their algorithm can’t apply here. It isn’t how ActivityPub or algorithms work. Their algorithm is per user. So that right there can’t migrate over. So a global algorithm which is way less useful is the only way. The only way to do that and have other instances ‘see’ it is to mess with the statistics. So they’d need to break spec. So if they do that (and destroy the ability to get user responses like upvotes and boosts for their native algorithm, ie make it less valuable to them) they’ll get defederated anyway. The argument here is just let’s see how it plays out. Literally nothing is lost by seeing what happens. If it’s a bunch of garbage, most instances will defederate anyway and no problem. There is no downside to wait and see.
I appreciate the perspective, but I still disagree on whether there is a downside. Waiting and seeing what happens with a group that is known to have malicious intent isn’t going to ever be a true net gain. So why wait and see? We all see enough from their platforms. Why invite that here at all? And once they are in the door I argue it’s harder to expunge them because now you have their end users in the mix crying out that they don’t want Threads defederated.
Threads does have the chance to bring the fediverse into more mainstream acceptance. It may introduce users who wouldn’t otherwise know there are alternatives. The net gain may not be one for you specifically, but the concept as a whole. It may not do that, but it can. And the argument against waiting and seeing being Thread users making noise? That seems farfetched. They don’t hold leverage at all.
Yes please block them, I don’t want Meta poisoning Lemmy. If I wanted to see facebook content I would have a facebook account, I don’t.
If they have any access to data through federation they could have just quitely made a small instance and stolen all the data. So while I 100% won’t be creating an account over there, and might block the instances myself, I don’t see the need to proactively do it.
Ya I hear that, and I have no interest in twitter or anything like it and don’t know how mastadon is used. So It could kill mastadon, but that could happen federated or not. If it does kill, You either die by the frustration when meta federatedly screws you, or by people just moving to threads. I don’t know which is more likely as I’m not versed in matadon.
But I see no utility to lemmy/kbin from federation with threads, so sure block it. I’m not seeing the doom for lemmy/kbin though, unless they make a clone of us next. Then I’d block them, because they could do the evil.
This doesn’t make the argument you think it does. This is an argument against Threads implementing ActivityPub. Everyone is complaining that it’ll be terrible content. And Google didn’t just do what Meta is doing. Google worked because they had their own ecosystem and had everyone join it. This article lacks a lot of the context involved and was just “big tech company joined a federated place and then left it and that killed that place.” That’s hardly the case. It’s more Google offering a different system. It would have happened even if they didn’t join XMPP. Apple hurt XMPP just as much.
