Threads being in the Fediverse is a plus for me, not a negative. It means I could follow regular people and friends who would never in a million years join places like Mastodon or Lemmy while I still get the benefits of being on those platforms, all while being shielded from Meta’s ads and data harvesting. The only issue is I don’t actually believe Zuck will go through with it. They’ll either never federate or severely limit it if they do.
Mastodon themselves have put out a post outlining how this will affect them (it won’t) and how EEE is not a threat. If Meta does eventually opt out of ActivityPub then cool. It’s not like that’s why Mastodon users were there in the first place.
They can scrape info already. Anyone can set up their own private instance, federate with others, and scrape info from there, and I'd be shocked if Meta wasn't already doing that. Besides the threads app collecting more data from the people that use the app, they can only collect data that is easily accessible from everyone else regardless of whether threads is federated or not
I get why people don’t want anything from Meta around stuff they use. They’re obviously awful. I just don’t think that even 5% of Fediverse users are going to ditch for Threads if Meta defederates. They were here before Meta and I can promise you not a single person on earth is signing up for Mastodon because it will federate with Threads only to have the rug pulled out from under them. This is a small niche community and that will not change with or without Meta. The people that Meta could siphon with EEE are already in their ecosystem.
I don't really see an argument for "extinguish" on that article. It looks like just "embrace, expand, unembrace." I can think of a few reasons how meta could degrade the quality of the metaverse, but the example of xmpp doesn't quite smell right - activitupub is mature (even if I disagree with lot of the core specs), and the fediverse is much more about "eventual consistency" instead of real-time chats where both side have to be online at the same time.
I don't really see an argument where Google drew people away from xmpp - the author themself said that nobody cared about the few xmpp users, so it's not like Google was drawing long-time xmpp users away.
They don't need to take it over if they have enough unwitting users / communities / instances associating with their content & users, perhaps. Maybe they don't care about a smaller competitor if they can just scrape all the data anyway.
The post has been put out by the people that made Mastodon. Why should anyone trust you over them when you provide 0 arguments against them.
Embrace Extend Extinguish was always a Microsoft strategy and one they have been forced to abandon over the years. Their attitude changed towards open source because it doesn't work! I think you might be the one who is lacking in knowledge or "education" here.
What's your question? Microsoft invented and then abandoned the EEE strategy because the strategy dosen't work! Open source never went away no matter what they did.