Meta can introduce their signature rage farming to the Fediverse. They don’t need to control Mastodon. All they have to do is introduce it in their app. Show every Threads user algorithmically filtered content from the Fediverse precisely tailored for maximum rage. When the rage inducing content came from Mastodon, the enraged Thread users will flood that Mastodon threads with the familiar rage-filled Facebook comment section vomit. This in turn will enrage Mastodon users, driving them to engage, at least in the short to mid term. All the while Meta sells ads in-between posts. And that’s how they rage farm the Fediverse without EEE-ing the technology. Meta can effectively EEE the userbase. The last E is something Meta may not intend but would likely happen. It consists of a subset of the Fediverse users leaving the network or segregating themselves in a small vomit-free bubble.
Some people asked what EEE is:
We are going to be open. Open to the idea that a bucket of shit does not have to be forced upon us. Open to using the tools to get rid of said bucket.
What I think is interesting about this is the decision to federate goes down to individual instances. So for example mastodon.social is the biggest - their decision is very important.
But on the smaller level, users will be able to choose instances that won’t federated with Meta. And they will be able to choose the inverse.
What I see happening is that the ones that do choose to federated with Meta will grow larger and sort of suck up most of the userbase. At the end of the day, social media sites are only as valuable as the number of users and the interactions between those users.
But to give power to the users we’ve got to solve the username problem. Usernames need to be global so there is no penalty to moving between instances.
Why not just do username@instance and then if you wanna transfer over to somewhere else you have to change your username?
I don’t really view that as an issue. The real issue is allowing transfer in the first place, which I don’t see anyone doing right now but I agree it would spark a lot of healthy competition between different sites on the Fediverse