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When people make up conspiracy theories about how Threads won’t support interoperability with the Fediverse because it’s a threat to Meta, I have a simple thought experiment.
Is being able to email non-Gmail users a threat to Google and Gmail?
@carnage4life I never thought it was a threat, just not worth their time
If they are doing it to avoid some EU regulations, it still doesn’t mean *we* are worth their time
@carnage4life
The way google treats non corporate email servers would indicate yes.
Google has almost single handedly made it impossible to self host email.
@quoll @carnage4life thank you for that example. Also Google obviously thought XMPP (sic?) interoperability was a threat
@simrob @quoll @carnage4life Pretty sure XMPP died a death not caused by any rug pull. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31519122
@tchambers @quoll @carnage4life I guess I see how you read that thread and come to that conclusion. I read that thread and come to the opposite conclusion: embrace and extend is the oldest rug pull in the book
It truly is. But I'm suggesting lots in that discussion to show that is not what did in XMPP.
@quoll @carnage4life is that because Google sees self-hosted email per se as a threat to them, or self-hosted servers used for spam and abuse as a major nuisance to them and their users?
@carnage4life Gmail exists to neutralize spam, which is a competitor to Google advertising. Interoperability doesn’t compromise that.
Threads exists, presumably, to show ads to its users. Interoperability with non-ad-carrying hosts does compromise that.
@shac @carnage4life I am not seeing why interoperability is much of any compromise for Meta. Threads users are still going to get shown ads from Meta. Those users will just have more content to have the ads mixed in to, making those users more likely to spend more time on Threads (see more ads).
The fact that there are users outside of Threads that see content from Threads users that are not getting Meta ads seem like something they didn’t have much chance at anyway.
@shac @carnage4life the only way I can see Meta is leaving anything on the table is if they think that they can use network effects and capture the entirety of the twitter-like social media market. Even if that is what they plan to do, interoperability doesn’t necessarily get in the way of that.
@carnage4life
That is a very poor analogy. I can't believe you don't see that.
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This is a useless, throwaway comment unless you elaborate.
@plasma4045 @carnage4life
Really?
The fact that email has been decentralized/federated for decades but social-networking websites have never been federated until identi.ca and subsequently AP and Mastodon and never a commercial one until today?
Really? Those two are analogous?
It’s extremely analogous, if that term exists. They’re both federated services which relies on both parties “speaking the same language” to work.
Email didn’t exist for millennia until one day it did.
Also, instance admins can just turn it off if Meta actually does misbehave. That’s a level of control I don’t think we’ve had before.
@carnage4life Also, Meta loses nothing supporting ActivityPub, “normal” people don’t care about the fediverse, so they won't switch to another instance.
Also, by supporting interoperability it gains some points with some of us nerds, as well as having tech sites keep talking about their new site.
@carnage4life based on their treatment of self-hosted email servers? absolutely.
@carnage4life No, but manifest v3 is. Point beeing while interoperability is good, future "innovations" might not be.
@carnage4life Yeah nobody on gmail thinks twice about being able to email people. People outside of gmail, different story when it comes to mailing people on gmail.
@carnage4life Is being able to iMessage non-Apple users a threat to Apple? 
@carnage4life Is being able to put links in Instagram photo descriptions a threat to Meta?
@carnage4life @tchambers That’s an interesting comparison. Because of Google’s massive popularity as an email service, smaller players must do things the way Google want. Otherwise mail deliver ability to people using gmail becomes a problem. This is an issue now. SPF and DKIM etc have to be done “right”, and the days of running your own mail server are mostly gone as it’s become such hard work.
*Thats* the threat here. If it becomes the defacto big player; it dictates.
@mattwilcox @carnage4life @tchambers this is true-ish, but Google is much (much!) easier to deliver to than Microsoft. There is a real threat to self-hosted mail represented by the big mail providers, but Google is among the nicest of them as long as your recipients like getting mail from you and don't report it as spam. It is definitely harder to self-host than ever before, but that's also because of spam. It's just a hostile space with infrastructure that wasn't built to handle hostility.
@carnage4life your premise that Gmail and Threads exist for communication is a bit wrong though. They exist for Google and Meta to control ads in very different ways.
@carnage4life Way to show you have no understanding of how terrible the e-mail ecosystem is by now. It's virtually impossible by now to self-host mail.
By your analogy, if Threads does the same, soon we won't be able to communicate with Threads properly and only de-jure, some messages would silently drop and the quality of the fedi would degrade.
@carnage4life Do you think that Google does not mess with the delivery of email to small servers and domains? My emails were rock solid until about 3 years ago, then started getting erratic in ways that push me into using a gmail address. Junk mail gets through pretty steadily, verification emails do not.