Comic by Rob Cottingham, via Mastodon

…people tend to think this is the time everything is going to be different.

That’s why I couldn’t help posting the above comic, from Rob Cottingham, once I saw it posted on Mastodon. The moment is just perfect because it’s very easy to notice how people — in general, I mean, but not me — seem to be excited about Threads, having just arrived at Meta’s latest party.

I’ve already written my personal opinion about Threads (in Portuguese), but I’ll use this post to, in addition to that — and the above comic panel —, quote a very interesting passage written by Rodrigo Ghedin in one of his latest Manual do Usuário newsletters, and that I took the liberty to freely translate into English:

The best thing about Threads, the new Meta social network, remains still a promise: interoperability with ActivityPub, the protocol behind Mastodon and other decentralized networks.

Rodrigo Ghedin

This coincides with what I wrote, because there’s really no day zero ActivityPub interoperability, jeopardizing my personal plans of only following my friends and family who are on Threads without ever stepping into the party venue itself. And again, as also said by Ghedin, that’ll only be possible when (and if) this promise is turned into reality, what remains to be seen. Until then, I can’t help take Meta’s intentions with a grain of salt… after all, they’ve crowded every square pixel of digital real state they have — Facebook and Instagram, remember? — with algorithms and advertising, and I believe it’ll be only a matter of time until Zuck and his homies enshittify Threads as well.

I’d honestly like to be wrong about it, but so many past platforms made me know better. Time will tell.