RIP open and user owned Internet movement attempt.
Say Hello to Fediverse+, for only $39.99 a month you can access ad free browsing as your feed is fed only corpo approved posts that have flooded and drowned out any alternative voices.
There is zero benefit to engaging with multi-billion dollar companies.
The harm is they embrace, extend, extinguish the Fediverse and I can easily see the W3C letting them donate and start putting in some features “to protect” the children or media ownership rights or whatever bogus excuse they’ll use to start cracking down on it like every company does every time it gets involved in something.
But then if other instances don't want those features, isn't the worst that can happen that instances just de-federate from Threads? I know the history of EEE, but I don't see how that can even work here.
That's not really an issue though; or at least, I'm not yet convinced it's one. We're here because we don't want to have compatibility with Reddit, and I'm on Mastodon because I don't want to have compatibility with Twitter.
Are we though? Because it looks like you're on kbin and I'm on slrpnk.
If either one of our instances decides to implement proprietary features that Threads creates (the second E in EEE) and the other one doesn't, that could break the experience of us being "here" together.
I should say I'm actively opposed to anyone gaining control of the fediverse but when I started using Lemmy, Masterdon and Peertube, (until about an hour ago) I was unaware that it would be this easy for a big company to just engulf it if they wished to.
If I knew that the fediverse could be controlled and then drained like every other internet community, I would have approached it differently.