Like most popular social media sites, you usually won’t see very valuable discussion in the comments, at least in my experience. It’s mostly for people to post news, research, and so on, and follow the big names or organizations in their field.

Most of the valuable information is diffused via posts but I do put a bit of time and effort into trying to filter out all the crap posts like memes, the faux inspirational stuff, self-aggrandizing nonsense, etc.

I think the fundamental question is, as the Fediverse gets more popular, then how will servers get paid for? Here are some possibilities I see for how Fediverse hosting could work at scale:

• Surviving off donations alone: Possible but in my estimation unlikely, and it could veer into the territory of big donors having a controlling stake or exerting their interests.
• Instances limiting number of users to what they can afford: This would require the network of instances process to really work well.
• Big instances selling advertisements: Without oversight or moral commitment, this could easily go towards creepy personal data collection.
• Crowdsourcing the costs: This would require transparency and fundraising or some other model
• Hosts financing the operation in other ways: This could also easily get into creepy data collection practices or other dark patterns.

I hope we come up with some process or plan for avoiding the pitfalls and forging an honest and community-integrating way forward.

The threat is a new sustainable community that’s sheltered from advertising that people could leave Factbook/Instagram/whatever and go to.

So then why was Meta trying to get Threads to be on the Fediverse? Of course they’re aware of any potential threats, no matter how small.