- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
“Threads is deepening its ties to the fediverse, also known as the open social web, which powers services like X alternative Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and other apps. On Wednesday, Meta announced that users on Threads will be able to see fediverse replies on other posts besides their own. In addition, posts that originated through the Threads API, like those created via third-party apps and scheduling services, will now be syndicated to the fediverse. The latter had previously been announced via an in-app message informing users that API posts would be shared to the fediverse starting on August 28.”
The basic idea is that a huge company with infinite money creates software that supports an open standard, such as Threads. Next they spend significant amounts of money driving users to their software, rather than an open software equivalent. Once they’ve captured a huge percent of all users of the open standard, they abandon the open standard, going with a proprietary one instead. They’ll make up some new feature to justify this and sell it as a positive. Because they control almost all of the users at this point, many of the users they don’t control will decide to switch over to their software, otherwise the value of the open standard drops significantly overnight for them. What’s left is a “dead” open standard that still technically exists but is no longer used. You can find plenty of past examples of this pattern, such as Google and XMPP.
Sorry, but that makes no sense at all. Why go through all that trouble when they’ve already accomplished the end goal you’ve outlined?
To kill any competition and ensure they retain control over future standards. Money. It’s pretty straightforward.
You are right, it’s easy to imagine the open source standard being a small financial threat. But a similar situation could potentially still happen, just without the malice the previous poster is imagining. Overall, large orgs make the biggest ripples in software development, so their choices of what to support affect what’s most available to users.