Why should Stack Overflow (part of Prosus - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosus ) be welcomed when Meta / Threads is shunned for being a big corporate evil company?
Being shunned from the Fediverse for being a corporate (evil or not) company is an inherently bad way to think about the Fediverse.
The beauty of the Fediverse is that it’s open to everyone and free (minus hosting prices/your data) to join, if we suddenly say we’re banning every corporation, then we’re a bit of a joke of a platform as that’s the exact opposite intention. While defederation exists it’s a joke to assume every huge instance will decouple from every major corporation.
Yes it is not optimal that an application such as Threads can adopt the protocol, but generally unless they destroy the protocol itself (highly unlikely) it’ll only affect competitors in direct competition like Mastadon. Even whilst being affected the main user base should remain as it’s currently made up of like minded individuals who despise corporations, respect our data privacy etc
I’m generally pretty anti-corporation, but federating and working with corporations is a great opportunity for the Fediverse. Corpos like Twitter, reddit, and meta would provide an easily accessible path to be in the Fediverse for non experienced users. And the Fediverse in return gets more users + more content etc.
You essentially get the opportunity to keep your data out of the hands of corporations(pseudo anonymously + open source) while being supplied with content from the average users.
Is it a for you based on your instance or based across all mastadon instances?