Links to source articles below.
Yesterday 30 million users signed up for threads, which is already more than active users in the fediverse.
Furthermore, it seems that Meta hasn't launched threads in the EU due to uncertainty regarding the Digital Markets Act. It is entirely possible that their intent to federate with other Activitypub instances is entirely a cheap way to avoid being labeled a gatekeeper and avoid other regulatory requirements or restrictions.
It's future use of ActivityPub to get better publicity or scrape a bit more data might be an added benefit but not it's true purpose.
We'll see if launch in the EU goes hand in hand with them turning on Federation. I suspect that ActivityPub and the Fediverse are merely an afterthought to them and a convenient way to avoid being impacted by certain regulations.
Edit: Found a brief overview of the DMA. Among other things they say:
"The DMA aims to ensure the interoperability of messaging services allowing users on services like WhatsApp to send messages to users on smaller services like Signal"
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_22_6423
In theory, however there's a saying: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Just because the standard is open doesn't mean you can't use it to strong-arm everyone else out of the market, and Meta is definitely big enough to do that.
ActivityPub is open, but Meta's client is not open IIRC. It can implement proprietary features that only work with other Meta clients and so they become the de facto standard, or subtly and intentionally introduce errors into the implementation of the standard to force practical usage to depend on the proprietary implementation of an open standard (say if they released an SDK), or you miss out on most of the users and content.
Microsoft has been accused of using this strategy, but I'm not an expert at describing it. Bottom line: the GPL protects how code is used for a specific project--it doesn't protect an open standard from having proprietary implementations.
Microsoft did this with browsers.
HTML was a thing, that was implemented by other browsers at the time. Netscape Navigator (the precursor to Firefox) was a thing that already did HTML well. It could access the world wide web, and was the defacto standard.
Microsoft introduced internet explorer, bundled with Windows. At first, internet explorer was not as good/complete/compatible as Netscape Navigator. Over time, it got better almost to parity. But it also added new features, features not in the HTML specification. They were not added to the specification, and how IE would use those features was not made public. So Netscape could not implement them.
Users started to expect those features.
Over time, more webpages would break on Netscape than on IE. Web designers wanted the fancy new features of ie. So users moved away from Netscape.
If only a number of technical users care about something, that the "mainstream" (for want of a better word) doesn't care about. Then things work less and less for the techies.
Meta could do the same with the Fediverse. As they already have market domination in other markets, they can introduce a lot of users to our "safe space". But be real if posts stop working and you as a techie knows it's because Meta have done something funky, Grandbob Jim isn't likely to care. Grandbob Jim will continue to use what "works". And some of the less techie of us will be forced to move to the MetaFediVerse to talk to our Grandbobs.
Thank you for explaining a real instance of this happening much better than I could.
Exactly. I think this is what people are nervous about. I don't trust Meta.
They literally changed their name so they could astroturf their own privacy hiccups...
If as much as 10% of Instagram signs up for threads they'd be as big as twitter. Threads could gobble up a lot of the incoming population of the fediverse and once they have enough people, defederate from everyone else, limiting the available content to non-corpo instances. Defederating from threads is of paramount importance for the well being of the fediverse.
They don't need to defederate. Just extend with Theads-only features to force others to funnel into their platform or else miss content. Slowly ramp it up until the competition mostly dies out on its own.
Exactly, due to metas nearly unlimited funding they can afford extra server strain for exclusive features that you'll miss out unless you're on threads
I don't know if I'd feel like I'd be missing out on anything personally, I don’t have any interest in what people from Facebook or Instagram have to say as I feel like it's going to be pretty watered down interactions with little thought behind it.
If they remove themselves from the fediverse equation after amassing a following, I would hope we would be left with what we just have here at the moment, which I'm quite happy with.
that's not what zuck wants to do with threads tho
And open them up to anti-conpetitive and monopoly law suits? Meta has already been getting calls to be broken up for having the top two social medias, if they get the full trifecta then they're gonna have a tough time selling defederation to the FTC or E.U. Better for them to take 90% of the pie and allow others to fight over the scraps then try for full 100% and risk litigation.
No, people seldom get overly forced into these situations. There are far more subtle, intelligent ways to handle a business rival.
Meta will probably make it impossible to create a third-party client
Not necessarily, it's possible that you could only use a Threads account from a Threads app. But hypothetically anyone on a federated instance could interact with a Threads user from a non-threads instance/app.