Technology

Disagree entirely.

For one, Meta has diversified enough that it's going to be nearly impossible for them to pull a MySpace. They have Insta, Facebook (blue app) and WhatsApp with a billion+ users each. Even Threads on its own is probably sustainable enough to carry them for a decade, and though far, far down the list, they've branched into other business like with the Quest. Except maybe pixelfed, there isn't really even a direct competitor (other than just the vague "social media") to Meta's properties.

Second, I don't think this is any indicator that Meta views the fedi as a threat. Had they, they probably would have just simply tried to buy their way in somewhere, as they did with Instagram and WhatsApp (this is definitely their MO, Facebook is the only true Meta product.) Further, I am not even sure how so many are making the case that the fediverse is somehow inevitable. Projects don't succeed on pure ideology, and in particular with social media not only do you have to do the technicals right including building a product that users actually want to use, you also have to get the right combination of deliberate community building and sheer luck to get it to stick. Already, the entire point of the fediverse is at odds with how the majority of people want to use social media. With fediverse stuff, you're expected to curate and deliberately shape your experience. I've found more use for blocks and mutes on Lemmy, which is ostensibly the smallest social media site I've ever used, and by a large margin. The default these days for most people are Instagram and TikTok - just open the app and watch whatever is served up.

So we're basically starting at a point that the fediverse is offering a niche product with technical hurdles (which, are very small, but it doesn't take much) for users to even get on, they're going to have to spend a decent amount of time to getting to a usable product, find out they joined the wrong instance and rebuild that, and the communities seem to be made up of the gotcha police half of the time. And then there are just the pure numbers. Even with multiple external exogenous events (like reddit had with Digg, for example) from direct analogues to Lemmy and Mastodon, Lemmy is barely growing and Mastodon probably gained about as many users last month as Threads did while I was writing this.

This whole debate on the fediverse is very "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day in your life, but for me? It was Tuesday." The fediverse, for its part, couldn't be a better stooge for Meta at the moment. They can say to regulators "look at us, we're open" and then watch as the fedi preemptively blocks millions of users from an introduction to the fedi.