The fediverse is discussing if we should defederate from Meta’s new Threads app. Here’s why I probably won’t (for now).
(Federation between plume and my lemmy instance doesn’t work correctly at the moment, otherwise I would have made this a proper crosspost)
And how many of those Google Talk users would have created an XMPP account if there hadn’t been any federation at all? If someone was on XMPP and asked a Talk user to come over, the odds they would be convinced were very small. Why would they when they can ask you to create a Google Talk account instead?
Why would someone create a Signal account when they can ask you to create a WhatsApp account instead?
People do it, because they’re convinced of it for one reason or another. But it’s a hell of a lot harder to convince someone to move when both are interoperable. Imagine if Signal and WhatsApp were federated together, do you think Signal would have nearly as much success as it does if WhatsApp users could just stay there to communicate with Signal users?