The guy in charge is essentially in cahoots with Meta and is under an NDA from them.
It doesn’t take more than 2 seconds of thinking to see how empty the words are that Mastodon is not at risk.
Threads federates with Mastodon instances
Threads uses its massive engineering resources to implement proprietary functionality that’s incompatible with Mastodon instances
A non-trivial number of Mastodon users jump over to Threads, this is the first wave of people that leave Mastodon
Threads drops support for federation and silos itself off
The majority of the remainder of people on Mastodon jump over to Threads because they want to be able to continue to interact with the people that jumped over to Threads and/or because they want to be able to continue to interact with normies now that they’re used to that
Mastodon is effectively dead, safe for a select few that stick to their guns
3 and 5 will happen in a cascading manner, the more people switch to Threads, the more others will also want to switch.
Number 3 will be difficult since most of the users moving are moving to get away from Meta. I find it hard to believe they’d just jump back into that ecosystem.
A lot of people aren’t really ideologically opposed to Meta, they’re just on Mastodon since it’s there’s less friction to use it than Twitter (see rise of Bluesky). Threads will “fix” a lot of issues people have with Mastodon (CW, no algorithm, inability to advertise, instances moving/going under) and they’ll move without thinking anything of it since they can still access all of their Mastodon content
Of course the move back isn’t going to be as easy, I doubt Meta is going to implement robust account migration, and then the easier choice is to stay on Threads. This is also ignoring the incompatibilities improvements to ActivityPub that Meta will introduce later on in Meta’s lifespan, which will be poorly documented and rapidly changing if they open it up at all
Even if many Mastodon users don’t switch immediately, this is enough to hamper the long term growth/health of the platform
Mastodon the non-profit is all but compromised.
The guy in charge is essentially in cahoots with Meta and is under an NDA from them.
It doesn’t take more than 2 seconds of thinking to see how empty the words are that Mastodon is not at risk.
3 and 5 will happen in a cascading manner, the more people switch to Threads, the more others will also want to switch.
Number 3 will be difficult since most of the users moving are moving to get away from Meta. I find it hard to believe they’d just jump back into that ecosystem.
A lot of people aren’t really ideologically opposed to Meta, they’re just on Mastodon since it’s there’s less friction to use it than Twitter (see rise of Bluesky). Threads will “fix” a lot of issues people have with Mastodon (CW, no algorithm, inability to advertise, instances moving/going under) and they’ll move without thinking anything of it since they can still access all of their Mastodon content
Of course the move back isn’t going to be as easy, I doubt Meta is going to implement robust account migration, and then the easier choice is to stay on Threads. This is also ignoring the
incompatibilitiesimprovements to ActivityPub that Meta will introduce later on in Meta’s lifespan, which will be poorly documented and rapidly changing if they open it up at allEven if many Mastodon users don’t switch immediately, this is enough to hamper the long term growth/health of the platform