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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Meta is a company that is gonna join us in being open and when they get enough users to have their platform running organically they cut us off.
So Threads, which is has 140+ million users and has consistently grown since launch without federation is worried about "getting enough users" from the fediverse, which has less than 10 million?
Fedi users are also about a bajillion times less likely to migrate to a Meta product than the other way around. There was the opportunity to catch some people and help grow the fediverse, but between this and the mastodon HOA (pushes glasses umm excuse me you forgot to put a CW warning on your post about flowers a flower killed my dog when I was five and this is very problematic trauma you're causing and your alt-text should be at least 3 paragraphs and include a bibliography) it's likely the fediverse just did what it needed to ensure it stays a niche for like 3 audiences and that more people are stuck with the corpos if they want content that's not about being a communist or using linux.
Anyway, this is a step for Meta to avoid regulatory scrutiny. Everyone keeps saying how Meta is going to destroy the fedi (don't worry, we'll take care of it for them) but no one is saying how. For example, they cut us off? So what? We're cut off right now.
If Threads, which has the biggest userbase of any instance, is allowed to connect with Lemmy, their communities will naturally become the most trafficked (embrace).
Over time, the Lemmy userbase will largely move everything to the communities with the most activity. Facebook could also add its own proprietary features that Lemmy users wouldn't be able to see or use without the Lemmy devs somehow found ways to enable compatibility (extend).
Then, after a while, Facebook could simply say, "Eh, ActivityPub isn't worth it," and turn it off, leaving us without most of the communities we've become accustomed to and without most of the users we've come to know through those communities (extinguish).
This is known as "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
Embrace a competing product and enable compatibility with the product. This may seem like some sort of goodwill gesture, but it's not. Companies are in it to make a profit, and any users not using their product is profit lost.
Extend the capabilities of your own product beyond that of your competitor's product, creating compatibility issues. Some existing users may jump ship to the "better" product because of this, and new users will be pressed to use the "better" product because of the compatibility issues.
Extinguish the competition by disabling compatibility with your competitor's product after they've lost users and stopped growing since you offer a better product with more features.
By using this method, you may successfully kill any potential competitor before they become a problem, nipping its growth in the bud.
You can find more information and examples on the the Wikipedia article about this method: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Aren't they doing this already without federating?
No, "embrace, extend, extinguish" specifically involves some sort of interoperability between a larger organization (Facebook) and a smaller one (Lemmy).