I'm glad to see someone find value in the open api nature of mastodon(and others). Thank you mastodon and ActivityPub for exposing the internet tubes.
Too many organizations and people were (and still are) using Twitter as a canonical RSS alternative, which we've now painfully learned it decidedly isn't. Any option that makes their posts accessible using open protocols is a win in my view.
What's disappointing is the in my view extreme reaction of part of the Fediverse to Threads adopting Activitypub (I have no sense on whether that's a loud minority or general consensus). I get the embrace-extend-extinguish concerns, but there almost seems to be some desire to want to keep Mastodon small and fragmented for various reasons.
The same applies to the planned (and heavily criticized) Bluesky-Mastodon bridge: I'd love to be able to have a single place to follow both using a single app and (importantly) using a single handle, and I'm afraid that without, neither protocol will gain critical mass since they're just too similar to be worth replicating every post and keep following people on both.
If I pick the wrong server, it seems like I might become a bargaining chip in some defederation drama any day, not being able to follow or be followed by who I choose (because they happen to be on an "evil" server), and potentially losing my follows and posts because I can't even migrate profiles to "evil" servers after defederation.
Meanwhile, self-hosting Mastodon seems like a hassle, and due to how Activitypub works would also make it somewhat tricky to bootstrap a list of people to follow, since discovery and search are non-global.
Bluesky seems to have solved that better, but can't currently federate with Activitypub servers, so it is yet another island for now.
If I am a trans person, my content will be shared with a company that has demonstrated it doesn't care about harassment, about racism, about large campaigns of hate that end in genocides. Meta doesn't care. Its accounts will see all I do, and will easily harass me. No, it is not possible to block them one by one, it doesn't scale. The only thing that starts to work is to block the whole instance because morons tend to congregate to the same instances (that's how the group effect works best). But even that is not enough because then other instances have access, and other people in my circle haven't blocked the instance so can also be targets, and it never ends.
In short: federation works if each island moderates its people. Meta demonstrably doesn't so it's not going to be a good citizen of the fediverse.
Much of the culture on Mastodon is anti-capitalist or created by marginalized communities that explicitly fled the mainstream web due to its toxicity and commercialism. They now see a Meta owned corporate behemoth showing up to assimilate them and flood them with all of the garbage they tried to escape.
It's very similar to the fear a lot of Hacker News users have about "turning into Reddit," of cultural contamination and Eternal September. It isn't entirely fair but it is understandable.
> I'd love to be able to have a single place to follow both using a single app and (importantly) using a single handle
For Mastodon, the only solution in this regard seems to be to host a single-user instance, which you can find inexpensive hosts for. Then follow whomever you want, block whomever you want, and add a couple of relays. I agree that identity management is one of the biggest flaws in the protocol.
Then again, centralized identity increases the possibility of tracking, harassment and centralized control over platforms so it can be seen as a feature and a bug. I kind of like Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project[0] conceptually, but I don't know what implementations are out there, if any. It would be nice to just host a data file somewhere, maybe with a pgp key, and be able to use that as an identity across implementations.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_(web_decentralization_pr...
Perhaps this openness in Threads is a temporary strategy while they grow their user base, and if/when they have a dominant market position they'll just close up shop again and rug pull the third party integration.