Adam Mosseri:
Second, threads posted by me and a few members of the Threads team will be available on other fediverse platforms like Mastodon starting this week. This test is a small but meaningful step towards making Threads interoperable with other apps using ActivityPub — we’re committed to doing this so that people can find community and engage with the content most relevant to them, no matter what app they use.
The communities you like, are shielded by those OSS terms: if Meta does something to the tech that the communities don’t like, they’re free to show Meta the finger. The tech is not, and can never be, controlled by Meta; the communities are not, and can never be, bound by Meta.
Meanwhile, having a company like Meta collaborate on developing and testing the tech, is something positive.
I get the argument and have made it myself. And it may very well be completely right.
The thing it misses I think is the broader cultural ramifications. There are network effects with federation and defederation. Already I think a zeitgeist has settled in the mainstream of mastodon that defederation and inter-instance drama is bad.
So mastodon stands to become a place that is basically Threads with some (very) small subsection on OSS instances that most users don’t know or care about.
The moment there’s any weird friction where something or some app doesn’t work on the mastodon side (maybe because handling the scale of Threads causes problems on the cheaper Fedi), the larger community won’t care, cuz they’ll be on threads and have been there or on IG from the beginning. And for all those that need/want that better thing, they’ll just move.
It’s worth remembering here just how much the Fedi is barely living off of the fumes of what donations it gets now.
All of that feels like the opposite of building out a new social web. It takes the passion and excitement away from the fediverse and mastodon etc and turns it into weird “why are you using that?” friction.
Now it may be that a balance will develop and the above won’t happen. It could be cool to be in the Fedi and talk to your Threads friends. Maybe all the instances will opt for simply silencing Threads, which is probably a nice compromise.
But, social media, for most, even those that care about OSS, is about the social part and making that happen as easily and enjoyably as possible. Forgetting this is the fediverse’s great trap/mistake. The moment Threads/Meta come in and trick us into thinking we can have our new social web and all of the convenience their platform brings at the same time, rather than building and learning how to do it ourselves without big-corps is the moment we give up on this project or lose the momentum to keep it going.
Or at least that’s the way it may shake out. And the broader point is that it’s not a technical problem. OSS isn’t a silver bullet that will save and protect us here. These are emotional, cultural and organisational factors, which don’t get enough recognition or air time as they should IMO.