Easily incorporated into the posts themselves

We should definitely block instances who insert ads into the content. However there is no evidence of threads.net doing something like this.

Not now… But they can easily do it if they get a majority market share. Don’t behave like they want? Defederated from the majority of the content.

They could threaten to defederate from us so we should defederate from them? It makes no sense.

Are you familiar with the story of EEE and XMPP?

XMPP works great, I use it everyday. It doesn't have to be popular, you only need to convince some of your friends to use it.

Are you familiar with the story of EEE and XMPP? If not, I'd say that's pretty much what Google did to one of the first big federated chat networks.

No one is. Not even you. It's not a thing beyond it being a thing uninformed people repeat.

XMPP literally just finished their 2023 GOOGLE summer of code. Go check it out. The info is on the workgroup blog.

I personally started to use jabber about 2000-2001. The bridges/transports were ultimately great idea, but flakey as hell. Being purposefully broken constantly by AOL and Microsoft. Beeper anyone ? Not something reliable enough to pull people away from those official clients. Nor a service that could gain a critical mass in its own right. Also keep in mind back then, there was no jabber.social or jabber.world equivalent. And not just because those TLD didn't exist. There were a ton of different small servers, generally run by strangers you had no real clue about or real trust in. There was no official or semi official flagship servers, professionally run. That the average person could place any trust in. There was hope with Google chat that they would be that flagship server. They weren't. Google "defederated" and shot themselves in the foot several times. XMPP kept on trucking. What really happened to XMPP, besides me being logged in 24/7 365 for the last 20 years. To this very minute. Was they pursued a standardization path. They now compromise 10 to 12 IETF RFC. The standardization path meant slowing the speed of development WAY down. This is what killed the BUZZ behind jabber/XMPP. Not jabber/XMPP itself. Burdened with the requirements of standardization XMPP developed much slower in comparison to Skype discord etc all.

Truth is, these days tons of people use it without even knowing. It's in IOT an SIP systems outside it's original scope of personal IMs.

This is exactly the case. There are so many more users than threads that even though we aren't directly being fed their algorithm, what makes it to the top of our posts will be content that are at the top of their algorithm.

It's Facebook's algorithm with extra steps.

It’s perfectly possible to create a watertight federated network excluding both federation and scraping from Threads/Meta on Mastodon using authorized fetch and whitelisting.

Authorised Fetch is not supported yet by /kbin