I look forward to being able to follow my friends who are on threads from my Mastodon account. If in a couple years meta stops supporting it, alas, we had two years.
great: then DM me at xmpp:colin@uninsane.org and lets talk more.
if this were 2008, your browser would render that as a link and clicking it would put us in direct contact, because likely than not you'd have an account somewhere. all i want is for that experience again.
but chances are you don't have an XMPP setup anymore, in which case my invitation above is useless. the specific protocol (XMPP, Matrix, Activity Pub ..) is less relevant to this: it's the social experience (and norms) which matters.
today, Activity Pub is growing back into those shoes which XMPP used to occupy. i can drop my handle at the end of a tech-related blog and people do take up the invitation. this year, (ex-)coworkers and IRL friends are actually using it. give it a decade, and maybe that invitation would be familiar even to my parents. 10 years sounds long, until you consider that's about as long as we've been without such a thing already.
and so it's like this: 1) how much credence do you put on that hypothetical future? 2) how much of a risk does FB pose to it? because if you believe we're on a good path, and that FB has even a 20% risk of derailing us from that path, then why risk it?
The Jabber ecosystem has not stood still, it is competitive with other over the top messages and calling options.
Facebook has 3 billion users, probably 90% of Mastodon users are on one of their services already. The entire Fediverse userbase is not just less than a percent of their userbase, but less than 1-2% of their annual growth, it doesn't even make a dent in the first derivative
It probably doesn't pay for the Threads servers and salary costs if they vacuumed up every last Fediverse user. At the bottom of all these EEE conspiracies is always a completely inflated sense of self
This seems like a terrible play given how small the fediverse userbase is.
The whole boondoggle is happening because many Fedi instances are ran by those very same enthusiasts. They chose to settle on Fedi for various reasons, and I’m pretty sure Meta transgresses most of those reasons.
Personally, I don’t care too much whether my server federates or not, but I’m a very casual user.
ActivityPub already has a few million users and a thriving federation
I have a pretty decent experience on Fastmail and had at one point reasonable experience on Protonmail as well (except that they could never manage to import my enormous 20 year archive of email :D). Most every ISP in the world still offers email, friends and family that have those addresses still manage to get their emails through. There are also plenty of newsletter hosts mail services that don't get dropped or put in spam.
Granted those aren't self-hosting, but these other hosting options just reinforce that it's more a matter of spam prevention than it is evil companies being evil (to be clear, I accept they are evil, and they do evil things all the time).