I’ve seen a lot of discussion about Threads around the fediverse and I believe our main instance community has had a few large discussions about it (here’s a recent one).
I didn’t see an Agora discussion post, so I’m making one.
Can we all discuss our opinions on whether we want this instance to remain federated with Threads or not and share our reasons? I’d appreciate it!
People are mainly concerned about ‘Embrace Extend Extinguish’ which is a method large companies have used to disrupt open source communities in the past. Here’s the wiki on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
You can see microsoft was big on using it to try to sabotage browser competition and later chat app competition. These days google is accused of doing the same browser competition sabotage.
So for social media this might look like: adding features to posts that only work on Threads, or possibly wrapping fediverse content in their ads / own comment section, and supressing the fediverse comment section / original creators.
I don’t know that this will happen and if it does it will take awhile - the initial ‘embrace’ step is meant to be non-threatening for the communities being absorbed.
Interesting article. I understand the concept there, but I still don’t see how defederation solves anything.
Threads is free to develop proprietary features in their app, whether they participate in the fediverse or not.
Defederation just prevents the two platforms from communicating. In my view, this hurts Lemmy’s growth far more than it could ever hurt a massive app like Threads. They are way too big to notice or care.