Hacker News Reader

Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

I like it. It reminds me of early era Facebook. Even zuck has been excited and shitposts like a 20 year old.

I don't think it'll stay that way for more than a month though. I see people tagging product owners, asking them to ban words like groomer because it induces suicide in LGBT or something. There's already giveaway campaigns to increase follower count.

It's novel fun now, enjoy it while it lasts. I fear it might be an EEE campaign to destroy the fediverse rather than twitter, but we'll see.

View on HN

> I fear it might be an EEE campaign to destroy the fediverse rather than twitter, but we'll see.

What's the motive? The Fediverse has a 7 digit user base, while Twitter has a 9 digit user base, so why would Meta care more about the former than the latter?

Not to mention, Threads shipped without ActivityPub support, so it's obviously not their top priority.

Slope vs y-intercept. Slope is a lot more dangerous. Twitter is sloping down, i.e. people would quit Twitter for some other social media. But so is Facebook. They're aware of this and have been rebranding away from FB, promising the next bigger thing.

Fediverse is slowly sloping up. That's a threat because it'll pull people away from FB, Instagram, etc.

But if 90% of the Fediverse is Threads, they have a bit more control over it. And they could ditch it later if it proves that it's no longer a threat, like they did with Parse and XMPP.

> But so is Facebook.

This is false. Facebook user base is increasing:

https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

> Fediverse is slowly sloping up.

Slowly being the key word. In 7 years, Mastodon has got fewer than 2 million users.

In 6 days, Threads got more 100 million users, without Fediverse support. Now that's a slope! There's something to be said for absolute numbers.

> That's a threat because it'll pull people away from FB, Instagram, etc.

Mastodon users are coming largely from Twitter. There's no evidence they're coming from Facebook and Instagram. And again, Mastodon's entire 7 year user base was surpassed in a day or two by Threads.

What's EEE?

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

The "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy is introducing a technology compatible with competitors, extending that tech with proprietary additions, then using those differences to disadvantage competitors.

The "embrace, extend" phrase appeared in a 1996 New York Times article on Microsoft, and for a decade or two was considered Microsoft's de facto strategy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

A reminder in this context: Facebook Chat used to be very open and operate with XMPP compatability, but stopped at some point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9266769

Reply on news.ycombinator.com