In the past I’ve argued that we shouldn’t trust Bluesky or Threads when they claim they will federate their services, opening them up in a way which radically reduces the switching costs for users. Even if the leadership is ideologically committed to this, would investors really let them when they get past the early growth stage which precedes enshittification? As I wrote at the time:
The fact Bluesky has staff with patently good intention and the firm itself is a public benefit corporation doesn’t provide us with grounds to assume they will evade this trend. The problem is that, as Doctorow observes, “The more effort we put into making Bluesky and Threads good, the more we tempt their managers to break their promises and never open up a federation”. If you were a venture capitalist putting millions into Bluesky in the hope of an eventual profit, how would you feel about designing the service in a way that reduces exit costs to near zero? This would mean that “An owner who makes a bad call – like removing the block function say, or opting every user into AI training – will lose a lot of users”. The developing social media landscape being tied in the Generative AI bubble means this example in particular is one we need to take extremely seriously.
I’m astonished therefore that Meta actually seem to be federating Threads, even if this is being done in a way which doesn’t reduce switching costs as radically as might be possible i.e. you’d still leave your network on Threads, it’s just opening up that network across platforms:
To the surprise of some, the company actually followed through. It built features to let Threads users share their posts to the Fediverse, meaning that someone who preferred Mastodon could follow a user on Threads and see that user’s posts in their Mastodon feed. They also enabled Fediverse replies to Threads posts for those who opt in, and let Threads users follow Fediverse accounts.
https://www.platformer.news/threads-fediverse-feed-bluesky-mastodon/?ref=platformer-newsletter
Mark Carrigan 