Meta promised to make Threads compatible with W3C open standard for social media.
But conditions are different now. Government officials mulling how to regulate large tech platforms today often turn to the idea of requiring interoperability, says Georgios Petropoulos, a researcher at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Threads is not currently available in Europe, due at least in part to uncertainties related to the EU’s new Digital Markets Act and other regulations—especially rules related to how Threads user data will interact with data on other platforms, Petropoulos believes. The new EU rules also contain provisions on interoperability that are still being hashed out.
Ah ha, this is the first great explanation I’ve heard for why Meta may be interested in joining the fediverse. Avoiding regulators.
I personally am excited to see Meta join the fediverse, and I think the design and implementation is strong enough to support both people who want to see Threads content and people who don’t, and that’s really exciting to me.
While Meta and the people it’ll bring with it is something I want to avoid, I gotta respect it when a massive company is willing to adopt an open standard they’re not in control of.
willing to adopt an open standard they’re not in control of
yet
Make no mistake, they will certainly try to capture the standard under their exclusive influence, just like Google has done with everything web related.
A corporation only ever adopts open standards when it is advantageous to them, the moment it is the counter they close it down or stop cooperating.
This has been repeated with Microsoft, Google, Oracle (Sun too), SCO for those of us old enough etc.
Embrace, extend and extinguish has been done over and over again from them all. Meta/Facebook is no different.
