“Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” is when corporate pigs try to get ahead on open standards, make their client the main one used, then make their client drop the standard.
Email is at risk since most normies use Gmail or Outlook. Google and Microsoft could agree to drop support for all other providers and people probably won’t switch to the other providers.
The most Meta can do is add a load of more users to the fediverse then take them away again. For them to successfully EEE the fediverse, it would require convincing existing fediverse users to switch to threads. I cannot see that happening on here on any noticeable scale.
The worst that can happen, is a bunch of new users appear on the 'verse from threads, then disappear again.
If anything, Bluesky is the bigger threat as it touts itself as “decentralised” in order to gain users who would have otherwise gone to Mastodon, then easily pull the plug on that, and we have to wait another decade for a maniac to ruin the platform to cause people to reconsider the fediverse.
I’m down with the notion of resilience in fedi, but I don’t know if that’s necessarily the direct worry.
In the immediate, more trouble could be made at the protocol level, which I think is where EEE is more relevant, i.e. specific technologies rather than federation as a whole.
So in my mind, even bluesky might not have as much potential to mettle with, for example, activitypub. That is unless they can usurp it and make atproto what everyone is using, or pivot to it and take it over directly. They have no real sense of control, except in their bubble. Drowning out the grassroots fedi might be a real concern, but I’m not sure if that’s exactly EEE or not. Rather it would keep grassroots small while growing the non-grassroots presence, but not necessarily destroy it. That might just be semantics though.
I guess my point boils down to the fedi “network” vs the “plumbing” of the protocol. One is a concept, the other is concrete tech. And I agree there isn’t as much concrete threat as perceived, anyway.
The worst that can happen, is a bunch of new users appear on the 'verse from threads, then disappear again.
We’re up against a Lovecraftian horror. US corporate social media have the motive and the almost infinite financial means to eliminate threats to their MUA, and they’ll use legal, semi-legal, and illegal methods.
They’re also a constituent part of the US government’s intelligence-propaganda-industrial complex, which wants to track everything we do and control the narratives.
Atlantic Council » Collective Security in a Federated World (PDF)
Many discussions about social media governance and trust and safety are focused on a small number of centralized, corporate-owned platforms that currently dominate the social media landscape: Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, and a handful of others. The emergence and growth in popularity of federated social media services, like Mastodon and Bluesky, introduces new opportunities, but also significant new risks and complications. This annex offers an assessment of the trust and safety (T&S) capabilities of federated platforms—with a particular focus on their ability to address collective security risks like coordinated manipulation and disinformation.
