I mean, that was a leap ahead, but there are currently a few companies directing towards the fediverse: Meta, Wordpress, Medium, Mozilla, Flipchart. Also look at the most recent The Verge arcticles about the fediverse, they are also pushing the point that the social web will be a growing market in 2024 (https://www.theverge.com/23990974/social-media-2023-fediverse-mastodon-threads-activitypub).

You could say that this is all hype, but I think its clear the "hobby phase" of the Fediverse is beginning to end and a new phase starts. At the latest when Threads federates with Mastodon.

https://www.theverge.com/23990974/social-media-2023-fediverse-mastodon-threads-activitypub

In this article, The Verge is describing what they think may happen to the Fediverse in the next years: big time commercialization.

Now the current Fediverse can either try to adapt to this new stage and try to grow with it; or block it out entirely and stay small. These two factions are by some called "big" and "small fedi".

I'm a supporter of "big fedi", because I think people will just move to other instances that federate with the big ones if we don't. From my perspective, a big bull is charging right at us. We can either jump on it, ride it and try to taim it; or get trampled dead by it.

I'm not. I'm saying Meta will most likely behave abusive, but not all the time and because Threads will be a major instance in the Fediverse soon, we will not be able to afford blocking it permanently.

And that's why, even if it may not feel good, we will need to find some handle of interacting with Threads that goes beyond simply defederating.

That's a good point. I could imagine Meta will try kind of a "franchising" of the Fediverse. With many little Threads-instances popping up that are not maintained by Meta itself but give it a fee for their software.

I think we should all be incredibly critical of any community and systems maintenance challenges in software released by meta, and be diligent about testing migrate-away scenarios. In fact, I would say that if they do release self hostable software, we make sure to port all the good features to FOSS software as quickly as possible.

Sounds like a good point although I'm not really in the opensource community to know how the dynamics are. Is it a threat scenario that is common and doesn't this already fall under EEE?

Yeah sorry. That was a mistake but I changed it now :)

I meant unique in the size and numbers of users. I think at a certain point, you will lose some beginner-friendliness if you want it to scale.

Dunno if it’s still true or not but I also recall that stuff like Lemmy depends on DNS, meaning you have to be able to buy your own domain and depend on that kind of central authority (wasn’t the point of Fediverse stuff to be decentralized?)

Well, then you could just as well call the web itself not enough dezentralized. The Fediverse just builds on that.

Rather recently a good amount of Lemmy servers were oopsied because one of the .tld authorities pulled the rug from under an entire top-level domain name.

Ok, that's not so great

Mmmh, you could be right there.

Ok, but you have still the other competitors. And even if you count them out, there will always be instances that federate with Threads. That's how the Fediverse works. Yes you can do coordinated actions, but only to a point. For letting Threads enshitificate, you would need an air-tight wall from Threads to all other instances and that's not possible.

Ok, but if you do this, when comes the time when you try to grow the Fediverse again? Currently, the Fediverse has about 2M users, which are mostly on Mastodon. With the entry of Threads, this percentage will decrease over time. It will weaken or position further. Probably, there will be some companies that will try to compete with threads and if we are lucky, they are nice to us. But on paper, our percentage and our influence will decrease further. When is the point when you turn the switch to growth and claim room in the market?

So no, I don't see how it could work. I think we are currently in the best position that we will have in the next years and we should use it to our advantage.

Facebook adopting the activity pub protocol does not mean we have to federate with them, and we should be beyond suspicious that they want to federate with us. No good can come of it.

Its pretty clear what they want: they see an emerging market and they want to claim and dominate it like they always do and they want to use us for their growth and they will use that growth for potentially bad things. That's all to be expected. But as long as they federate nicely with us, we should federate with them too. People will start asking themselves why some users have different domains and when important public figures start posting from the fediverse, word will get around. People thrive for freedom. I would go as far as saying that we have a responsibility here: our presence on Threads shows people the alternative to walled gardens.

And once important public figures have migrated in the Fediverse, temporary defederation will hurt Meta much more. Meta hugely underestimating what happens if the Left has pointed out the Fediverse as their new frontier.

How can all of that happen by just defederating? For me its a form of casting away responsibility.

Its a monopoly, its behaving like a monopoly. But because of network effects, we cannot just ignore it, we have to go in direct combat.

At least if you want the Fediverse (with a diverse instance-landscape) to become big, confrontation with Meta is inevitable.

If you don't want it to become big, that's fine, but then we have a different opinion there.

Interesting point. With activitypub, Threads could try to avoid enshittification.

The Problem: Threads, Mastodon and the other Fediverse apps will soon not be the only players in the Fediverse. At least letting die Facebook of enshittification will not work at this point. And additionally, if Threads decides to franchise its own instances, you have tiny thread-instances all over Social Media not even operated by Meta and that seems pretty resistant to enshittification.

A facebook client that can chose to defederate from facebook? The overall vibe on Threads is already not exactly great. Threads growth is limited (altough it could franchise at some point).

It would be good if the market outside Threads would continue to grow at such a rate that it is too expensive for Threads to pull EEE. As it is currently. As long as this is the case, the fediverse has a chance of surving.

I think its not clear yet who will be eating whose lunch. It will be probably be a continuous back and forth.

Why is it proven? Also: isn't the whole Fediverse situation kind of unique?