There’s just something fucking hilarious about laying off employees, mocking them, and being sued for improperly firing them – and then whining that your competitor hired them and that they have access to Twitter information still.
I believe this fits well under the “fuck around and find out” doctrine.
Elon didn’t need any extra help running Twitter into the ground, but it’s already too late to put the genie back in the bottle, Threads is already going to take over, and it’s honestly 1 solid update with added features away from absolutely decimating Twitter.
I would’ve preferred more people migrate to Mastadon, but that’s over, any momentum that may have had will be sucked away by Threads until they screw up, hopefully by then Mastadon will be in a better position to capitalize on user dissent.
Mastadon was never going to be mainstream, really, it required too much activation effort from people who are used to everything being streamlined and now are expected to start over. Threads can immediately port over any Instagram user and everything they already do, there is little to no barrier for entry.
Services from non-tech giants are only going to appeal to people willing to put the effort in to remove themselves from those company’s clutches. Which isn’t most people.
Threads is federated. So even if Threads absolutely takes over the microblogging market, that doesn’t kill Mastodon. Instead it guarantees the long term viability of Mastodon.
At least that is my naive hope.
That hope is indeed naive. If you want to see what threat Threads poses, look at how Google killed XMPP.
On the other hand, google didn’t kill smtp with Gmail.
First of all, SMTP was much more well-established before Google came along than XMPP was.
Second, from what I’ve heard, Gmail (and other big players like Hotmail etc.) did have a substantial detrimental effect on the proverbial “little guy’s” ability to self-host email… at least if he wants outbound messages to actually be delivered instead of blocked, anyway.
It’s difficult to predict what will happen, but that’s my hope as well. I’m going to wait and see what happens with threads federation before making any decisions.
Agree that’s my hope, that it takes the whole idea of the Fediverse into the mainstream, and that it will live on no matter what happens to Mastodon.
One solid update, and a good desktop version of Threads and Twitter is done for, especially if a Threads API comes out and third party devs make apps as well.