The negativity was pretty asinine though. Nothing he said, I think, was wrong. I remember Mastodon people (rightfully) reacting quite annoyed at similar reports on how usage had peaked and was dropping again, just because not all the new users stuck around.

Let me get this right - you’re worried about tracking it use an Android phone?

I’m not an Android user, so I don’t know Sync, but it’s bound to be a better Lemmy app than those godawful cross platform ones. I’m glad it exists!

I’m not disagreeing with you. You’re saying that the fediverse produces badly designed and branded services that mirror existing apps with massive user bases, that won’t be great until a lot of users migrate over. None of that is wrong! It’s why Lemmy is a mess that constantly breaks, and Reddit is still way more useful, even if most people here hate it.

It’s just that most Lemmy users care enough about decentralisation to ignore those product downsides, in the hope that they it can be overcome over time. With a messaging product, that’s even easier. You can just install it and wait until other users join - network effects are ’much more limited than with eg Lemmy.

Discord is a centralised, proprietary service, sup would be a fediverse app. Discord is better than Sup just like Reddit is better than Lemmy.

Sadly it doesn’t look so much like an iOS app, more like a bad Instagram clone 😕

Sure, but ”They built a very successful business and uses that to squeeze publishers“ is a very different explanation than “Amazon sells books at a loss”.

The idea that Amazon subsidises book prices or generally sells everything at a loss is based on a flawed understanding of the early years of Amazon.

That hasn’t been true for more than a decade. (Why be in a business you can’t make money on?) Amazon have, for a long time, invested more or less all their profits into new business lines on the promise that they could easily “flip a switch” and start making billions in profits. (They started doing that a few years ago after bad financial results.)

There should be regulation to force carriers to adopt eSIM? Physical SIM cards are an anachronism that should have died a long time ago.

XMPP wouldn’t be around even if Google never interacted with it. It died because that category of product died.

Threads isn’t a Lemmy competitor - it competes with Mastodon

That argument suggests open source products couldn’t possibly compete with a closed-source alternative.

I think few people would migrate away in that scenario. Some might create additional accounts (none of this is zero-sum). It’s not unlikely that Mastodon itself will become bigger because of it, and it’ll get hard for Meta to unilaterally pull the plug - a bit like email.

If the Threads product was so superior, and Mastodon so unable to respond that millions would leave Mastodon - sure. I doubt it though…

The outcome then would be that Meta’s instance would be defederated/defederate itself - how would that be different from now?