The state of the internet 2023

Threads is going to be federated. But lots of instances have already said they’re going to defederate it immediately, because lots of people expect that federation is part of the EEE business plan. That’s Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Originally pioneered by Microsoft, it’s basically a way to kill off tech that you don’t want to compete with.

First embrace it, and do everything you can to be friendly towards the people using it. It’s an open standard, and you want to act inviting and supportive. Lull your competition into a false sense of cooperation.

Then extend it. Start creating proprietary additions which exist outside the standard. Do this under the guise of supporting the standard. These additions should be difficult for competitors to implement, but you maintain that this is all done to further improve the standard and bring more functionality to the end user.

Then extinguish the competition. Once you’re the de facto producer for this tech, (because users have come to expect those proprietary functions,) then lock down those proprietary changes so competitors can’t use them at all. Make the alternatives noticeably worse to use in every way, to force everyone into your (now closed standard) platform.

A good example of this is Microsoft Office. Ever notice that Word documents have historically been awful to try and open/edit in other word processors? This was because Microsoft was using EEE to make the other word processors worse. It’s also what Google does with Chrome, implementing non-standard additions then using their market share to bully competitors into joining; Every Firefox user has seen the dreaded “your browser isn’t compatible with this site. Use Chrome instead” message at least once.

Meta's new Threads network is supposed to start federating via ActivityPub at some point.