Slope vs y-intercept. Slope is a lot more dangerous. Twitter is sloping down, i.e. people would quit Twitter for some other social media. But so is Facebook. They're aware of this and have been rebranding away from FB, promising the next bigger thing.
Fediverse is slowly sloping up. That's a threat because it'll pull people away from FB, Instagram, etc.
But if 90% of the Fediverse is Threads, they have a bit more control over it. And they could ditch it later if it proves that it's no longer a threat, like they did with Parse and XMPP.
Slowly being the key word. In 7 years, Mastodon has got fewer than 2 million users.
In 6 days, Threads got more 100 million users, without Fediverse support. Now that's a slope! There's something to be said for absolute numbers.
> That's a threat because it'll pull people away from FB, Instagram, etc.
Mastodon users are coming largely from Twitter. There's no evidence they're coming from Facebook and Instagram. And again, Mastodon's entire 7 year user base was surpassed in a day or two by Threads.
Fediverse is slowly sloping up. That's a threat because it'll pull people away from FB, Instagram, etc.
But if 90% of the Fediverse is Threads, they have a bit more control over it. And they could ditch it later if it proves that it's no longer a threat, like they did with Parse and XMPP.