This is good for us, and for businesses, influencers and celebrities.
They need to be encouraged to operate their own instances, and not just an account in Threads or elsewhere in Meta.
- You get to have a “home base” for your presence on Threads and the Fediverse that’s independent of Big Tech. Ah, the advantages of owning your online house instead of renting! That’s why we have a Fediverse.
- You get to make the rules, not Meta. You’re not getting your content taken down by a faceless corp because some AI software mistakenly concluded you violated TOS. You’re not gonna get NSFW’d out of business so some CEO can make bucks with an IPO. And you can kick off the jerkwads that are harassing you when Meta won’t.
- You get to structure communities/discussions on your instance the way you want.
AND, getting enough celebrities, influencers and businesses to operate their own instances will take power away from Meta. If there’s a critical mass of in-demand people and content outside of Meta in the Fediverse, and Threads users get access to that content, Meta won’t be able to wall up the garden without a riot from their users. Enough celebrities on Threads, but not on their servers, and Meta will be forced to keep things open and make EEE much harder for them.
Now all we need is for a few in-demand people to make that leap…
Thoughts?
Oh yeah, look at the Twitster Fire when King Elon ordered those viewing limits. That was blocking cities, states, and federal agencies from communicating with the public. Sometimes in emergencies.
Yeah, governments are going to want their own instances for that reason.
It would solve the verification problem that twitter has now that they want organizations to pay thousands to be verified. Instances ending in a .gov domain would be obvious legit government accounts.
Would make it a little like work email addresses too.
Say, if NYT had their own instance and disabled open sign-ups for user accounts, you could be certain that any account posting from that instance is a legit NYT account.