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:
There is something to what you are saying, but at this point you are overblowing it and otherizing people just because they participate in a social media platform you don’t approve of. Yes, social media alters people’s neurochemistry, but it doesn’t mean Thread’s users are mind controlled by Mark Zuckerberg.
And it is about the people. However much you don’t like the company itself, and I don’t either, there are millions of people there that are worth engaging with. Treating it as a faceless evil monolith is oversimplifying the matter.
It’s also almost conspiracionist how these discussions have been going. How exactly will they bully their way into controlling a decentralized ecosystem? If you think Meta can just pressure every admin and none of them would resist, not only that is putting no confidence in the Fediverse, what makes you think defederating is going to prevent that from happening? If you start from the assumption that nobody has any principles and corporate influence can’t be resisted, then it’s all for nothing. It would be only a matter of time for the Fediverse to be swallowed.
But as far as motivations and structure goes, I don’t think it is so fragile.
I’m merely describing the actual real physical changes that Facebook causes, on purpose. Every single click you make on Facebook makes you a worse human being.
Those people are still welcome to join here. They just shouldn’t be permitted to do it through a server known to be malicious. Facebook is malware and letting it connect to your server makes your server just as dangerous.
Monopolies don’t just exist when you literally only have one choice. Having 90% of the market in and of itself is an extremely powerful position. It happens all the time to decentralized systems.