Federation with Meta will probably not have a huge effect on Lemmy. Threads has no communities after all.
It will probably be mostly a Mastodon thing.
I am pro-fediverse, so I guess making Mastodon atleast as easy to use as Threads is a must.
If you look at statistics, Mastodon always gains a massive amount of users, when Twitter does something stupid. Most of these also return back to Twitter, the moment they realize, that Mastodon has no VIPs.
If Threads integrates well with ActivityPub, then people on Mastodon will be more likely to stay, because Threads gives fediverse users access to the VIPs, that they used Twitter for in the first place. This stops people from leaving Mastodon in the short term.
In the long term Mastodon needs to advertise itself to younger people, because nowadays this is the only way for new social media platforms to establish themselves.
That’s how TikTok, SnapChat and Instagram became popular. This would make Mastodon fresh, while Twitter would transform into a graveyard like facebook.
Also having more tech companies, media orgs, cultural orgs, universities and maybe even governments host their instances, would make the federated aspect stronger and the whole fediverse more scalable.
Threads is a Twitter competitor. Same applies to Mastodon.
Twitter is only useful because companies, celebrities amd politicians embrace it. Nobody cares about ordinary Twitter users. Twitter is a platform for networking with people in the industry and announcing stuff to customers.
Mastodon right now is not an alternative to Twitter, because there is practically nobody important there.
Threads has better chances to overcome this and has already in a few hours pulled more VIPs onto their platform, than Mastodon in multiple years.
XMPP was extremely niche before Google and it is slightly less niche right now. It did not die.
You can not destroy the fediverse with EEE in my opinion.
I mean Tumblr also wants to join the fediverse. They are smaller than Twitter, but still large to have some amount of influence.
Meta gets all the data as well, even if all people defederate.
ActivityPub has it in the name. All your activities in the fediverse are public.
The article talks about private data saved on your phone like health data, contacts etc. Threads takes those, Mastodon app does not.
As the fediverse grows, there will inevitably be more centralized instances. Every big tech corp may want to start their own instance, similar to how most tech corps provide their own mail services.
There are millions of email service providers, but Gmail and Outlook are synonymous to email for a large amount of people.
Defederating with Meta and Tumblr is like Protonmail blocking every mail from Gmail. You just cripple yourself and make your instance useless.
This is a wild template