Those of you not plugged into the Mastodon community may not be aware of the predominant reaction to Instagram Threads. This started when it was merely rumored, reaching a crescendo with reports that Meta had been talking to a few of the larger Mastodon instances under NDA, presumably to encourage them not to “defederate” with Threads when it came online.1 Let me describe that reaction for you, with only mild exaggeration:
Definitely. And I don’t think this article is “right” or does predict future (because it can change in a drop of a hat) but with all these doom and gloom comments about Meta/Facebook ruining ActivityPub I enjoy hearing about opposing (and valid imo) views.
But like I commented somewhere else, there is something here that Mastodon and ActivityPub can gain here. Threads is already big (10M users or something) compared to Mastodon (2M users or something). My biggest fear was that Threads was going leech users off of ActivityPub but looking how things are, there’s a chance it would go the other way with Mastodon gaining users. And you’re absolutely correct that Meta won’t play nice but I don’t really see how they’d be able to stop the growth Mastodon would’ve potentially already gotten. But what do I know.