Those of you not plugged into the Mastodon community may not be aware of the predominant reaction to Instagram Threads. This started when it was merely rumored, reaching a crescendo with reports that Meta had been talking to a few of the larger Mastodon instances under NDA, presumably to encourage them not to “defederate” with Threads when it came online.1 Let me describe that reaction for you, with only mild exaggeration:
And the fact is Threads has what, 10M users already? And Mastodon has like 2M? They’re already a success and leeching the 2M off of Mastodon isn’t a big success for them.
My fear was that Threads was going to steal users into their ecosystem but if there’s going to be federation, right now it looks to me like Mastodon actually stands to benefit more than Threads from it (not taking into account EU regulatory systems).
Over 100 million users as of today, not 10 million.