I’ve seen a lot of comments suggesting Threads should be pre-emptively defederated by Lemmy/kbin instances if it tries to join us. I’m a bit confused what the problem would be. When Meta does its usual corporate bullshit over at Threads, how would that hurt a user or community based on Lemmy.world? If anything, wouldn’t it give the fediverse a boost if Threads users start discovering communities outside of Meta’s control?

I presume I’m missing something, as you can probably tell I don’t fully understand how Lemmy, Threads or federation all work.

  • Cevilia (she/they/…)@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    There is a known strategy called EEE (Embrace, extend, and extinguish).

    First, they embrace the open web. Millions of people who never would’ve joined the Fediverse (and, probably, don’t even know what the Fediverse is) flock to Threads and start to interact with us.

    Then, they extend the open web, adding features to Threads that aren’t compatible with our servers. People on Threads don’t understand what’s wrong with our server (even though it’s Threads that’s the source of incompatibility).

    Finally, they decide they’re “having trouble maintaining compatibility with third party servers” and start to break off from us, leaving us with no way to interact with our new friends. Unless, of course, we make a free Threads account…

    Google Talk is perhaps the most relevant example of this. Here’s more details.

    • red@feddit.deEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      The XMPP stories/comparisons are such bullshit, imho.

      Sure, both Google and Facebook both used XMPP for a while (even at the same time, so you could message someone from Google on Facebook), but XMPP was an unpopular niche protocol before that and it’s still the same today. I used to be an uber (foss) nerd at the time but even for me the appeal was close to zero - although I’ve tried it several times.

      I’ve also literally never heard of anyone signing up for Google or Facebook due to their alleged XMPP 3E strategy. Google Mail was already the most popular and most hyped mail provider and Facebook was at its height as the defacto quasi-monopolist social network as well - everyone who was willing to sign up with them had already long done so.

      (Funnily enough, the Cisco in-house messaging and video calling solution we use at my work, through which we also receive landline calls, is still running on XMPP to this day, so I sorta became a XMPP user after all…except I haven’t started this software in 10 months because fuck landline calls and we have better alternatives for chatting.)