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I appreciate @pcottle's entreaty to the attendees of the #FediForum to engage with the Threads team genuinely.
Meta/Facebook have a mixed track record when it comes to open formats/standards (fool me once, etc etc); but at the same time, ushering in 130M potential new users to an open, social web is also an opportunity not to be dismissed out of hand.
I am optimistic that the current team is showing up with good intent and I intend to reflect that.
I'm also optimistic that the people on the current #Threads team are showing up in the fediverse with good intent and genuinely want to make the integration work. However, #Meta as a company is going to pursue its own interests, and just as ruthlessly as any other company of their size.
We all know AP has its shortcomings. Meta can add a lot of value (to users, to developers) by extending it -- and in fact they probably will have to, just to make things work at the scale they're likely to have and to avoid the kinds of user confusion we take for granted in today's fediverse ("oh yeah you don't see all the responses to a post, it depends on these incredibly complicated rules that different software sometimes implements differently").
So embrace-and-extend is a given, and if it's in Meta's business interests to follow that by exploiting the ecosystem, then of course they well ... and if it turns out that AP can't overcome its current limitations, then of course Meta will look for another solution.
Like I said at today's #FediForum session I think there are likely to be a lot of positives to Threads' arrival in the fediverse but anybody who kids themselves about who they're dealing with is setting themselves up for a very negative outcome as soon as they're not useful to Meta.
@chrismessina@mastodon.xyz @pcottle@threads.net
I think Meta sees the writing on the wall. Social is going to go the same way as email. A federated network. Gmail can't defederated from the rest of the email servers without making itself irrelevant. At some point the decentralized social is going to be that way too.
It should be interesting to see how Meta monetizes Threads. Ads would only work for their own users. Are they going to offer additional services, like cloud storage, custom profiles, e-commerce options, etc.? They may have to come up with some new ways to produce revenue.
Either way, I look forward to seeing what happens.
CC: @Chris Messina @Emelia
