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Comment by lapcat | Hacker News Reader

> There are more than enough amazing communities – sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc – to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news.

So it's literally nothing more than text-based Instagram.

If "The goal isn't to replace Twitter", then what's the point, and why rush the launch, with a ton of missing features, just to take advantage of Twitter's latest problems? ("This was a lot more of a yolo launch than anything we've done in a long while." https://www.threads.net/t/CuZpfirN81T)

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> If "The goal isn't to replace Twitter", then what's the point, and why rush the launch, with a ton of missing features, just to take advantage of Twitter's latest problems? ("This was a lot more of a yolo launch than anything we've done in a long while

It is just a narrative to counter Twitter’s lawsuit.

https://www.npr.org/2023/07/07/1186367564/threads-meta-twitt...

> It is just a narrative to counter Twitter’s lawsuit.

There's no lawsuit. There was a letter sent from Twitter's lawyer, and it's a complete joke. Meta has already denied that any former Twitter employees worked on Threads.

> There's no lawsuit. There was a letter sent from Twitter's lawyer, and it's a complete joke. Meta has already denied that any former Twitter employees worked on Threads.

You can also counter lawsuit by preventing it to happen. (Letter was threat)

And it does not matter what Meta says. If someone wants to sue, court it is.

And it would be interesting case, since they are quite identical apps.

> It is just a narrative to counter Twitter’s lawsuit.

> And it does not matter what Meta says. If someone wants to sue, court it is.

You just contradicted yourself.

…

You are either implying that either it is impossible to influence things by saying things or that countering cannot also happen beforhand if the lawsuit happens (while also helps in preventing that). Why people argue about everything.

> sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment

As if these industries aren't often political

Right?! This is the dumbest bit from a pretty dumb statement. Politics is just people working out how they're going to interact with each other. There's no way to cordon that off from anything else. You can certainly pretend that those industries don't interact with politics, but that's just another form of politics.

> then what's the point

Killing the fediverse: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...

> Killing the fediverse

So Meta launched Threads without fediverse support, for the primary purpose of killing the fediverse? That makes a lot of sense...

Not to mention that the fediverse was never a threat to Meta.

If this is a YOLO launch, then Facebook have scale and moderation down to a science now. Hats off, those were very hard challenges in the early days of web 2.0

>So it's literally nothing more than text-based Instagram.

Instagram is very political. It's like half political action related infographics at this point.

What? Its mostly influencer BS with some memes and random dances on Reels and stories to share what you ate today, also out of date news because of an algorithmic timeline.

The algorithm is probably showing you political stuff, but its definitely not the majority of content.

> If "The goal isn't to replace Twitter", then what's the point

To corrupt and destroy the Fediverse, with a 'Twitter killer' narrative to the point where not even the anti-trust enforcers can begin to argue that Threads has lock-in since the users can move off of Threads. (Which they won't move anyway.)

But we'll see when Meta eventually begins to screw over their users. I doubt they would care. But at this point, they are the new Fediverse.

> To corrupt and destroy the Fediverse

Threads launched without Fediverse support, so this makes no sense.

Threads (Instagram) already confirmed that they will federate and has the resources and money to do it, so the likelihood is almost certain.

With 90M users, they are essentially the new Fediverse. All other Mastodon instances see that as a threat and banned it in advance. Otherwise those NDAs would never have been signed or sent in the first place to those admins of large instances. Might as well have been a blank document if they were joking.

In reality, it has already split and corrupted the Fediverse. (Thanks to the signed NDAs.)

The question here isn't whether Threads will corrupt and destroy the Fediverse, the question is why does Threads exist? To corrupt and destroy the Fediverse is a nonsense answer. Why would Meta care about corrupting and destroying the Fediverse, which is extremely tiny compared to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook?

You mentioned Fediverse support as somehow protecting Threads from antitrust regulators (a dubious notion itself), but there wouldn't be any need to protect Threads from antitrust regulators if threads didn't exist! What exactly is the raison d'être of Threads, if not to replace Twitter?

I know you love to bash Mastodon, but it's a red herring to this discussion.

The bare-bones launch of Threads seems to reveal Meta's priorities: the algorithmic feed, and the promotion of brands and influencers.

> All other Mastodon instances

By "all" you mean the fraction of a fraction of moderators of specific instances that signed onto the petition.

The vast majority of Mastodon instances will happily federate. My instance definitely will. Why not, it's free content

The fediverse is irrelevant here, threads is already much larger than it, multiple times in fact.

If anything, threads proved how slow mastodons growth was, and how small the fediverse is.

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