🔗 What Meta’s Fediverse Plans Mean for Threads Users | WIRED:
Another big, lingering question is why Meta wants to do this in the first place. Lambert says Meta wants to give users more control over their posts and followers, with easier avenues to engage across platforms. In the context of previous antitrust complaints from the US Federal Trade Commission, it’s also possible the company is trying to project an image to regulators that’s more open overall and welcoming to healthy competition.
I don’t buy for a second the idea that Meta is doing any of this because they want “to give users more control over their posts and followers, with easier avenues to engage across platforms,” except maybe to the extent they think they can squeeze a few extra ad dollar out of it.
Likewise, I am skeptical of the suggestion—mentioned earlier in the same above-linked piece—that these moves are all part of some grand and intricate plan to take over the internet. They may end up having that effect to some degree, but I am pretty firm believer in Hanlon’s Razor.
It’s that last bit about trying to look better for regulators that I think is the important part.
Personally, I would prefer to see Meta as a company burned to the ground. I would like to see significant and meaningful personal data privacy regulations that would make their entire business model impossible. And I would like to see Mark Zuckerberg and a bunch of other executives called to account and face real consequences for the harm caused by the companies they lead.
I would like to see all of them taxed heavily on the majority of their astonomical incomes and the internet regulated as the public good that it was supposed to be rather than the privatized value-extraction machine Meta and its ilk have turned it into.
That’s just me, though, and in lieu of all that, I’m kind of okay with an outcome where these companies get scared into some degree of open interoperability. Ideally, that tactic should serve as a wedge to start widening the cracks and breaking apart the closed-off monoliths they have built.
In the meantime, though, it’s a start.