this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Not sure what to think of this honestly. Like imagine a small email provider decided to block Gmail, that's a death sentence. It's impossible to get people to switch apps when they have to leave behind all of the content and people they used an app to interact with. And let's be honest, threads is going to run at a loss for a long time to grow their userbase before they start pulling weird shit. We need to have a migration path when that happens, and if threads is blocked everywhere, people will lose their content and contacts upon switching, so they won't do it.
In the long term, alternative platforms need to be built on something different than outrage and "not being the bad company". In the end, the vast majority of people cares very little about the underlying technology, they just want their content and people to interact with. Mastodon is in decline already, the fediverse shouldn't be a place where people come to say "wow, [company] sure does suck", and then go back to that company if they actually need a piece of information or reach a person that does not know or care what an API or federated protocol is, aka 99% of the population.
I consider email (and snail mail) a significantly more essential service than social media. Email service providers starting to block each other is much more likely to have a negative effect on my life than being disconnected from some friends, influencers or current news
The difference is that the email protocol has long been established and any new email client is built to that protocol standard. What we have here is an open protocol still being developed. The fear is that FB will force changes into that protocol and take it over. Then it will no longer be an open development protocol. By expunging FB right now before they get a firm grip on the userbase it can preemptively prevent FB from causing damage.
We are kind of in unexplored territory right now. You could compare it to google/MS taking over xmpp but it's not quite the same situation either.
But the reality is that the current fediverse doesnt need facebook to be successful. It already has the users to continue to grow. By combining user pools facebook would have the majority share with their instagram users which means they would have a controlling share of users and would leach users away from the fediverse over time until they broke away at which point fediverse would die as most users would be forced to follow in order to keep their feeds.
This way those feeds never mingle with FB and thus fb cant leech them.