It’s a small advance, but one that speaks to Meta’s enginerring team paying attention to how the fediverse community is trying to educate Threads users about the possibilities.
The fediverse is now something that you can evangelize about. Its turning into a buzzword ...
Bottom line: is threads a potential entry-point into the fediverse for a lot of people who otherwise would not be aware/ interested? ABSOLUTELY YES.
Does that benefit offset the catastrophic harm it will do by overwhelming the fediverse with corporate interests, stacking nonprofits with Meta-friendly officers, and exerting leverage on Activity Pub development? NO WAY.
(Federated) email didn't survive. It got completely subsumed by the major providers who now have control over everything email related. It's now impossible to run your own email server since none of the major providers will deliver your email without your mail server having first built a reputation.
The fediverse analogy would be if 99.9999% of users were on Threads and you couldn't interact with any of those users from any of the small independent fediverse servers. Frankly, that's exactly what it looks like is happening.
You realize the second part would also happen if the Fediverse "takes off", yes? Then naturally companies would come in and trivially take things over as there's money to be made.
It's a natural end state until governments can be made to curb corporate freedom.
The official story is that Meta is worried about being sued by people suddenly seeing their content pushed to some random website without their consent if it's enabled by default, so they won't risk enabling it by default. At least not before the fediverse is huge enough that everything you post going everywhere on the internet is the expected behaviour.
Fair enough really. I wouldn't want to be sued for that either, and they obviously cannot expect Congress to understand.. anything.
Threads is for whoever Meta can sell it to, and I think it was pretty far along in its development before they actually committed to ActivityPub support.
You raise an interesting point. With web 2.0, we did the equivalent of all the fediverse stuff blocking meta. And look where that got us. Maybe it's time for a different approach.