I hear that it’s linked to nerve damage since my father started having it in the 1980’s. How’s that new?

Yes. And it’s also not clear how EEE is going to be applied here in this case.

EEE is easy to do when you’re adopting something no one uses, like what happened with XMPP.

EEE is not easy to do with something that millions of people use. Look at emails, for example. Emails are still out there.

And let’s stick to the example of emails. If every other email server decided to not work with GMail, then 99.99% of users would migrate to GMail and GMail would “win” so hard that emails would cease to exist outside of Google’s control.

If you tell people that they can only interact with the hundreds of millions of people out there if they use the popular proprietary tool, they WILL choose the popular proprietary tool. Even if that proprietary tool push hate speech and bad news down their throats. And that’s going to kill any chance Mastodon might have had.

People have been repeating these fearmongering ideas, but with nothing concrete.

How is Threads going to destroy the fediverse if we make it easier for people to choose to come to Mastodon?

And how do you think that pushing people towards Threads is going to save the Fediverse?

And, like I said, if the entire protocol that the fediverse runs on is independent of Mastodon, how can Mastodon even stop it?

Not totally sure, but I don’t think that negotiating with Threads on anything at any point is a winning strategy. They’ll win every time. Kind of a ‘give them an inch they take a mile’ situation in my head.

Federating with them isn’t “negotiating” in any way.

Any fear of Threads controlling the protocol is out of our hands, because the protocol isn’t in the hands of the Mastodon devs, it’s in the hands of W3C. So no matter what Mastodon instances do, it won’t affect Threads and W3C.

At least by staying separate the user base will have to make a conscious decision about where they want to spend time instead of letting Meta dictate that for them in the future.

I think that by not federating with them, we’re TAKING AWAY the option for people to make a decision, and forcing the worst possible choice on them. Imagine I want to follow a guy that is really popular on Threads. If Mastodon federates with them, I can decide to make an account on Mastodon and follow the guy from the safety of a network that it not governed by algorithms that promote hate, or I can decide to make a Threads account and follow them there. It’s my choice.

But if Mastodon instances do NOT federate with Threads, the only way for me to follow that popular guy is by creating a Threads account and using the Threads app. By not federating, Mastodon removed my ability to choose and forced the worst possible option on me.

We should want MORE people using Mastodon, not fewer people. Let them follow Threads profiles from the safety of Mastodon.

And how do you think defederating them will affect that at all?

They can just use their influence and say “here, W3C, add this and that to the protocol”.

How will a small mastodon server with a few thousand users stop that? Defederating them is useless.

My favorite part is having to explain a rule for the 17th time.