I think it’s pretty safe to say that the majority of us are here to avoid another corporate takeover of our preferred platforms. It would seem to me to be a tad irresponsible to allow Facebook into our space with open arms, allowing them to hoover up our data. I would love to keep using Lemmy.world, but will happily change instances if need be, and I feel many share that sentiment.
Last thing they need is our users. Threads is already bigger.
Honestly, I think they see the idea of the Fediverae a threat, and want to embrace, extend, extinguish.
There’s no way they see it as a threat. They have millions more users. They’re just not as engaged or active perhaps as we are. But by the same token most of us are very against meta and other companies like them. There is no reasonable or logical way in which they could extend, embrace or extinguish it. Though I would be very interested to see you try to explain how. And it’s especially funny to see all the people being manipulated. Who have no idea what really went on trying to claim that Google embraced extended and extinguished XMPP. The XMPP work group just finished up their 2023 Google Summer of code for Christ’s sake. Google didn’t kill them and they’re not dead.
So why they are expending dev time to partially integrate with activepub? What they earn? Cause this would not make them a dime, not in short term, and even less in long term.
Easy. Because Twitter is their biggest closest thing to a competitor. And right now under the shepherding of the petty little man child is floundering. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend. But they sure can be useful.
Threads launched to the audacious soft squishy thud of a freshly fallen turd. Millions of potential users who don’t give a shit about it. On the other hand. Feddiverse users though fewer are wildly, passionate and engaged. So much so that people on a largely disconnected feddiverse system are losing their ever-loving minds about meta even coming anywhere near them.
Right now, realistically we’re nothing to reddit or Twitter. I love the feddiverse. I’m a jabber/XMPP advocate since the 1990s. But let’s be honest, we’re still a pretty small group compared to social media over all. Meta however thinks it’s worth while to form a coalition to topple the twit. That it’s worth while to them to tolerate to some extent a den of lefties, Marxist, and even murderous leninists that couldn’t be more anti them. I’m with them as long as it takes to topple musk. And then we’re coming for their user base. To Free them from their algorithms and pro-corporitist censorship. Coalitions go both ways.
Is it? After the initial account register, it looked like it was running out of steam. I’d be surprised it lasted long without something new.
Mastodon was immediately dwarfed from the very first day Threads was launched. Total Fediverse MAU has been hovering a but under 2 million, Threads first day user signups totaled more then 30 million. Threads’ growth has leveled off now but it’s still orders of magnitude more massive.
Threads users didn’t sign up, it used their Instagram account. Even if they used it once, they click across, and boom, account there and they cannot delete that Threads account after. An initial day registration does not mean a MAU. It’s like saying MySpace is huge now because everyone had an account…
Edit: Usage plumetted massively- https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/14/threads-app-slump-daily-active-users-twitter-competition
Threads’ daily app downloads have universally been in the range of 350k-700k for the past month. Mastodon’s MAU for the same time period has been 1.1 million.
More people downloaded the threads mobile app in the past three days then have interacted with Mastodon in any capacity for the past month.
Edit: Even your cited source pegs Threads’ lowest recorded daily active users at nearly half Mastodon’s monthly active users, and that was from before the app was made available in India and the EU
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/04/threads-downloads-return-to-growth-as-x-adds-walmart-to-its-advertiser-exodus/amp/