Everything will stop existing if you go far enough

You should leave immediately and stop trolling

Not sure if you are trolling, but no

Meta is joining the Fediverse not because it needs the people currently on the Fediverse, but because it needs a regulatory figleaf to protect itself from monopoly charges. At Meta’s scale, there are 0 users on the Fediverse right now. There is no market benefit to getting Fediverse people to move to Meta

What Meta gets out Threads/Fediverse compat is that suddenly Instagram is not technically a walled garden with platform lock-in, so while the number of people who’ll migrate from Instagram Threads to the Fediverse is going to be tiny they suddenly look a lot less like a mean monopoly to regulators

At some point they might remove the Fediverse compat. The people currently screaming about embrace-extend-and-extinguish because Meta is joining will then scream about bait-and-switch even though they’ve had Threads defederated the whole time. The Fediverse will still be there. That’s the cycle of life

Of course.

All of us will stop existing at some point. You and me in a couple of decades. Our species and all life on Earth when the Sun goes red giant. Even the universe will die one day dissipating into the maximum entropy of the heat death, or another big bang (not sure about the latest theories)

Probably. Not sure if this will do it. But there’s inherent privacy concerns in having a bunch of relatively insecure silos interoperating as a semi-social network even if most of us do so with varying degrees of anonymity. For the moment, most of us are here to avoid corporate overreach so motivations are in a certain degree of alignment. But it’s just a matter of time before something goes wrong or the winds change in an unforeseen way.

MySpace still exists…

What?…. No

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Threads, like Mastodon and the social media website formerly known as Twitter, are microblogging sites. While Mastodon users do show up here once in a while, I don’t get their posts unless they actively post in a Lemmy community.

So if your instance decides not to defederate from Threads, and you choose not to block Threads using Lemmy’s upcoming individual instance blocks, you might see their users occasionally comment on stuff. If I recall correctly, it’s pretty difficult for Mastodon users to post on Lemmy for technical reasons that will also apply to Threads.

I do think that quality of life in the wider Fediverse could dip once Threads users are allowed to participate and Threads content is allowed to spread. However, I think that the impact on Lemmy will be small. If it isn’t, we have defederation and soon individual instance blocking to help us filter out the crap.

Because the code for Fediverse sites is free and open source, I think that the Fediverse will exist for the foreseeable future. However, Meta could make it worse. If their past behavior is any indication, i.e. basically all of it, then that’s probably what they’re going to do eventually. At the end of the day, if Threads is too irritating, someone will start an instance of something that is defederated from them.

Personally, I’m not exactly thrilled by the prospect of Meta (or any corporation) joining the Fediverse (or any other aspect of public life), but I think we’ll be okay. I am concerned for people in marginalized groups who will have to deal with the toxic community that Threads has allowed to fester. However, there was a big stink about this a couple months ago where some big instances pre-emptively defederated from Threads. Now might be a good time to make an account on one of those instances.

Regardless of what happens, you will not be literally forced to go to Facebook or Threads. In the absolute worst case scenario, i.e. Meta takes over the Fediverse, you join or host an instance that doesn’t federate with anyone.

I’m an anxious person myself so I know this is hard to internalize: you’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.