this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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I've used this analogy before, but threads is like a huge, 5k passenger cruise ship docking in a small town in Alaska. You don't have to know ahead of time that the 2 public bathrooms, one at the general store and the other at McDonalds, aren't going to be enough. You can also forecast the complaining about how everything isn't really tourist ready. It will suck for everyone. The small museum will be overrun and damaged, the people will be treated like dirt. It's an easy forecast.
Here's the important bit, just because they've never been in the cruise line business, doesn't mean you have to give them a chance to ruin your town.
edit: made sentence make sense.
The problem with analogies is that they are not literally the thing that you're analogizing, so there's going to always be parts of the analogy that don't "work."
In this case, what resource is Threads (the cruise ship) actually using from the small town (the rest of the Fediverse?) that causes the inhabitants of that small town any actual trouble? The fact that people on Threads can read posts from people on the Fediverse doesn't actually affect people on the rest of the Fediverse in any way. If you're concerned about the converse - the Fediverse being overrun with content from Threads - that's not actually something that they're implementing.
This comment feels like it's been on the Fediverse too long. To continue the analogy, your small town suddenly starts hosting a lot of voices on soap boxes. The more visited the town becomes, the more town criers it gets. Those criers bring their audiences, so not only do you have long queues for the two public bathrooms but you get fights in the town square; struggles over ideologies and all the underhanded trolling that entails. Corpos move in, governments move in, all eager to bend the ear of anyone unfortunate enough to get in grabbing range.
I liked Digg. I loved Reddit. At some point you just need to make a stand. Money and profitability aren't part of the equation, fuck'em. I'll keep my small town tyvm.