Do you think Meta's Threads app will be beneficial or detrimental to the Fediverse?
Personally I believe that it'll make people associate the Fediverse with Threads, which is not a good thing. Edit: It'll replace their definition of the Fediverse, with Threads, and people may widely forget about Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin etc.
Considering that the big majority of Threads' users are cringe influencers, brands that are ads themselves, and celebrities who don't want to interact with anybody but their bootlickers (who are also celebrities), I would say it's detrimental to the fediverse.
You're judging the platform based on the earliest of early adopters. Yes, people with nothing to lose and everything to gain by being on the ground floor of the platform have joined, but general adoption will take a little while. It will grow and normalize. They do have an uphill battle convincing people to leave Twitter, and frankly, ActivityPub isn't a big selling point. Being able to talk to nerds who left Twitter and Reddit isn't going to drive the average Instagram user or current average Twitter user to a platform - or else they'd be here. Yes, that's the side many of us know, but we are not average users.
I look forward to it. Granted, I wonder at this point if ActivityPub is still on the roadmap given the user count and communication already happening. Their goal is to hurt Twitter, and that's starting to happen already. Why should they seek out conflict when they're winning?
When I draw from experience with Meta it will mean harm for the Fediverse. Their moderation will be bad. They won't ban Nazis. Nazis will attact marginalized people in the rest of the Fediverse. So instances will block Threats some won't = The fediverse is split. Zuck wins.
Why exactly do you believe that a partial mass-defederation of Threads would "split" the fediverse? That's not how interactions between instances works.
It's not a technical split, but an ethicsl split. Until recently the fediverse took pride in the fact that they watched out for eachother. If tgere was an instance that didn't moderate nazis, they defederated or at least muted it. Now, that the instance in question is run by a corporation with a history of bad moderation, desinforamation and hate-speech they get the benefit of doubt, because people think it's cool that an awful guy like Mark Zuckerberg sees a chance of making big money on their hobby. I think Meta joins the Fediverse to attack Twitter. It's a means to end competition. Thus they will not let the rest of the fediverse become competition.
"Competition is for losers" -- Peter Thiel
And that is not a mistake or a missing feature in a beta version. People can easily join but they can't leave. Threads can only grow. And the will remain this way until someone wins in court against Meta
It's good for Thread users because they will have an open API where they can download all their content and/or move to other instances freely. Cory Doctorow talks a lot about how Interoperability is the most important part for truly open social networks.