Meta has zero interest in ActivityPub or the Fediverse, a tiny speckle of users hostile to them. In less than a week, they've created an "instance" 50 times the size of all of Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse combined. The projection/goal is to grow towards 1B MAU, which would make it 500 times larger than all of the rest of the fediverse.
Why would Meta possibly care about this tiny group of misfits? The only reason I can think of is to give legislators the idea that they are "doing good".
Say it is done, and we have this Threads cosmos-sized instance. Tiny vocal Mastodon instances will defederate out of principle, and nobody cares. Because they are anti-growth anyway, they object to anything.
Larger Mastodon instances will consider federating but will then find out Threads will only do this under conditions. You have to serve ads, have to comply with a moderation policy, treat user data in a certain way. You effectively work for Meta now, but unpaid.
Then you turn the thing on and the flood gates open. The first thing you'll notice is your bankruptcy as your few tens of thousands of users now having follow access to a billion users, including very active and popular ones, spiking your infra. 10x? 100x? Who knows? And what about storage? Yesterday I've read how a mid-sized Mastodon instance (few thousand users) was adding 1GB of media storage every 15 mins. Do that times a 100 (or 1,000) as well. Your moderation inbox...well, good luck.
I wonder if they'll surprise us all a little and allow people to create - tightly controlled mind you - personalized fedi instances for things like "fan experience", but from the Threads app perspective it allows you to jump "portal to portal" if you will, without leaving the app, so it feels seamless. This would open other monetization verticals for Meta via platform creators etc. It'd also give you data carve outs that let Meta see what the most popular verticals are and they can sell specialized targeted ads against that, which would likely fetch a bigger premium and provide more useful analytics.
Also worth consideration: They could federate your Facebook feed in the future too.
It may not be so much supporting the protocol from the outside as its worth doing from the "inside".
EDIT: I'm not talking about full blown customization here, just enough that allows creators to make their direct profile feed look different from the standard app, maybe have targeted links or a special background color etc. Simple but differentiating things.
I think it won't happen at all, for most of the reasons you gave and more. The feature will never launch. Either because negotiations with various Mastodon instances just falter, or because Meta just loses interest, or both.
Ultimately I think their play here is they want to build their social graph and interaction model around users that are not on their network right now. Every time you boost or share something that came out of Threads, they'll learn something about you -- a non-Meta user -- that they couldn't get just from mining public content. But I think they'll find they're actually not interested much in that data, that its value isn't high enough to justify the hassle.
I just think it's a tempest in a teacup and by the autumn when it's rumoured to be supposedly launching, we'll just stop hearing about it. Or there'll be a trial for a bit and then it'll just get unceremoniously dropped.
Meta has zero interest in ActivityPub or the Fediverse, a tiny speckle of users hostile to them. In less than a week, they've created an "instance" 50 times the size of all of Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse combined. The projection/goal is to grow towards 1B MAU, which would make it 500 times larger than all of the rest of the fediverse.
Why would Meta possibly care about this tiny group of misfits? The only reason I can think of is to give legislators the idea that they are "doing good".
Say it is done, and we have this Threads cosmos-sized instance. Tiny vocal Mastodon instances will defederate out of principle, and nobody cares. Because they are anti-growth anyway, they object to anything.
Larger Mastodon instances will consider federating but will then find out Threads will only do this under conditions. You have to serve ads, have to comply with a moderation policy, treat user data in a certain way. You effectively work for Meta now, but unpaid.
Then you turn the thing on and the flood gates open. The first thing you'll notice is your bankruptcy as your few tens of thousands of users now having follow access to a billion users, including very active and popular ones, spiking your infra. 10x? 100x? Who knows? And what about storage? Yesterday I've read how a mid-sized Mastodon instance (few thousand users) was adding 1GB of media storage every 15 mins. Do that times a 100 (or 1,000) as well. Your moderation inbox...well, good luck.
This entire thing isn't going to work, at all.