I’m not sure what Meta’s goal is with adding federation to Threads. Some options include:
Preempting government scrutiny for monopolistic practices
Gaining a competitive advantage against Xitter/Bluesky/etc…
Giving Threads users access to more people/content
As for why I think the flow of users is likely to be away from Threads:
People who already actively use Mastodon and the like tend to be fairly technically sophisticated and anti-corporate. Not many of those will switch to a Meta product when they can reach the same audience without it.
Most people who joined Threads got there via Instagram. Those sorts of mainstream users mostly haven’t been exposed to decentralized, non-corporate social media. The added exposure of seeing it from Threads is more marketing than these open source projects could ever hope to buy.
I’m not sure what Meta’s goal is with adding federation to Threads. Some options include:
As for why I think the flow of users is likely to be away from Threads: