To be clear, the issue that many people have with Threads is not that Meta can’t be trusted with our data. It’s true, but that’s not the main issue. The main issue is that there is no reason for Threads to try to federate with us unless they are trying to kill the Fediverse.

Meta is a big company, they can attract users on their own and support their own ecosystem. Isn’t it strange that they would try to federate with us? We are much smaller in comparison, and we won’t help their user activity just simply because we are much fewer in number compared to the users on Threads. The only reasonable explanation is that Threads is trying to federate with us because they are pre-emptively trying to kill the Fediverse before it becomes a serious competitor.

This is a very standard practice for tech companies, so much so that it has its own name: EEE (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). If a tech company notices an up-and-coming potential competitor, they will adopt the same technology as the competitor by passing it off as a partnership (embrace).

Then, they’ll slowly start introducing changes to the technology, and they’ll introduce those changes in such a way that it’s intentionally difficult for the competitor to implement something similar (extend). This could be anything like making an extension to the ActivityPub protocol that only works with a Threads account (proprietary extensions) or publishing the change but intentionally obfuscating the documentation for that change, so that the competitor’s implementation is buggy (sabotage). This all occurs behind the scenes, so the users will start to wonder why the competitor seems so buggy and slow. They start to switch to Threads because it’s more stable and fast, not realizing that the whole reason why Threads appears more stable is due to sabotage.

Then, once the competitor has developed a bad enough reputation and once enough users have jumped ship, Threads will defederate. The sudden loss of users and the bad reputation that the competitor picked up during the “partnership” will destroy the competitor so much that they will never fully recover (extinguish).

If a big tech company comes to you with a partnership deal and it’s not apparent what exactly they’re getting from the deal, you can generally be sure that they’re only offering because they want to destroy your brand. I don’t trust Threads.