WhatsApp had 500 million MAU when it was bought up.

That’s 250x the fediverse.

They really don’t care.

Yeah, it’s been hilarious watching the fediverse think Meta gives a rat’s ass about either reaching them with content or getting access to their horde of memes.

This is about preempting regulation.

Meta would love nothing less than having their interoperability push still end up as a walled garden, and if I didn’t know better regarding their total disinterest about Lemmy or even Mastodon existing, would even suspect that the degree to which they’d be meddling in the conversion would be creating posts about how people should be irrationally upset and defederate from Threads.

Though they don’t care enough to be involved in the conversation at all, and know full well that the fediverse will hit scaling issues should it ever miraculously gain traction long before it is actually a threat in any way to their market dominance.

All that said, it’s still pretty hilarious to watch the inflated self-importance and slight paranoia that goes with it leading to bitter debates like this though.

Users.

It’s generally easy to crap on what’s ‘bad’ about big players, while underestimating or undervaluing what they are doing right for product market fit.

A company like Meta puts hundreds of people in foreign nations through PTSD causing hell in order to moderate and keep clean their own networks.

While I hope that’s not the solution that a community driven effort ends up with, it shows the breadth of the problems that can crop up with the product as it grows.

I think the community will overcome these issues and grow beyond it, but jerks trying to ruin things for everyone will always exist, and will always need to be protected against.

To say nothing for the far worse sorts behind the production and more typical distribution of such material, whom Lemmy will also likely eventually need to deal with more and more as the platform grows.

It’s going to take time, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the only way a federated social network eventually can exist is within onion routing or something, as at a certain point the difference in resources to protect against content litigation between a Meta and someone hosting a Lemmy server is impossible to equalize, and the privacy of hosts may need to be front and center.