Seems to me the largest hurdle in these newer places getting off the ground successfully is that the alternative market to Twitter/X is the multiple venues, too many people quitting but all going to discrete places. Have you heard anything at all (I haven’t but I don’t have much of an ear for these things) about a merger? If so, what’s the main problem?
Threads? Mastodon? Bluesky? Why don’t they merge?
They don’t need to. Once one emerges as the leader, everyone will quit whichever one they’re on and join that one. And all of the competitors are gambling that they’ll be the one to win.
OK, but isn’t it far better to own half of a successful media site than to maybe dominate the media and maybe go belly up? Logic says that they’re at least talking with each other. If those three merged, they’d force X to its knees tomorrow.
All of those claim to be federated, so other services will be able to talk to them in the future. For an analogy, think of e-mail. You can use Gmail, and still send an email to somebody with iCloud, and receive an email from a company running their own email service.
Mastodon currently is federated, in that, like email, it is not one thing, but lots of different services talking to each other over a protocol called ActivityPub. At some point in the future Threads is supposedly going to federate with Mastodon. If (when?) that happens, then I will be able to read Threads posts from my Mastodon account.
I use Bluesky, but haven’t bothered to follow what their federation plans are. I’m not sure if there will be other Bluesky services that talk to the original Bluesky, or if it will talk ActivityPub to Mastodon (I don’t think so, but I might be wrong).
The point is, there isn’t really a reason for them to join up if they all talk to each other anyway.
I don’t know what “federated” means.
Just that it’s like email or your phone. You might be on Verizon, but I can call you from AT&T. Federated means different providers can talk to each other using a standard protocol.
Just like there are reasons you may choose Verizon (or Gmail) over AT&T (or Hotmail), there are reasons someone might choose Threads over a particular Mastodon server, but they’ll still be able to talk to someone on a different service.
(Threads has not yet federated with Mastodon, but they are promising to.)
Are they? Out in the open? Or sub rosa?
That’s really what I’m asking about. If I can just sit back and wait for the inevitable, I’m fine with that.
They’ve always been upfront about it. Whether they actually do it, and what it will look like once it’s done, I really can’t say.