Some insights from Alex Stamos that I found quite interesting.
TL:DR;
He predicts the challenges will be as follows:
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Content Moderation: Enforcing actor and behavior-based content moderation will be difficult in the federated environment. The lack of metadata available in Federation makes it harder to stop spammers, troll farms, and abusers.
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Privacy Obligations: With Threads content being pulled down and cached by other servers, it becomes challenging to comply with right-to-data-deletion requirements, such as those imposed by GDPR. The Fediverse lacks mechanisms to enforce content deletion.
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Competing with Other Platforms: Meta may face difficulties in competing and reaching feature-parity with platforms like TikTok and Twitter while being bound by the feature set of ActivityPub.
Thoughts?
The most compelling theory is that it’s a way of avoiding regulatory control for being a monopoly. Otherwise, their actions make it pretty clear that their target isn’t to join or even compete with the fediverse, it’s to go at Twitter.
That’s why they’ve launched now and are “promising” federation “soon” (I do wonder if the launch was brought forward because it was a good time to kick Twitter and BlueSky while they were down.
Every chance that federation never happens or only when the regulatory danger becomes more real because Threads actually works out and gets a large sustainable user base.
Interesting take! This idea might play out in the courts if Twitter sues.
Don’t think the monopoly thing would come up there … it’d be out of scope for a civil suit between the corporations.
In reality, that court case is probably just proof that Musk is actually kinda shitting his pants over this, because it’s the first undeniable sign that he may have literally set 10s of billions on fire. No one can react healthily to that reality.
When he bought twitter, the possiblity that in a year’s time Zuck (and others, Mastodon and Substack’s notes too) would just literally build their own Twitters that would viable compete would not have been on his mind. It was objective mainstream truth that “Twitter” was the one and only “Town Square”. Interestingly, it was by taking that for granted that he showed the world how wrong that is … and of course, those of us old enough to remember the “old” pre-2010 internet already knew this.
Otherwise, the whole phenomenon of a big corp promising to federate and never delivering is kinda a meme now. Tumblr promised the same last year and haven’t spoken about it since.