It’s a good objective, but it would take a lot to make it happen. It’s significantly more challenging for tech workers to effectively unionize en masse for several reasons:

• Tech isn’t monopsonistic, or even close to it; there isn’t a single large employer… even the biggest tech companies employ only a relatively small fraction of the tech workforce. That means separate unionization efforts at thousands of big companies, not at one.

• Tech job functions are much more widely varied than “delivery driver”; job responsibilities differ greatly, complexity and education requirements differ greatly, workplace expectations differ greatly … think of the difference between help desk, front end dev, network security engineering, data science and DBA. Collective bargaining is harder the more varied the needs of the collective are.

• Job mobility is really high in the tech sector … in other words, tech employees (by and large) have access to many prospective employers (especially with the prevalence of remote work), and tech employers to a wide geographic pool of talent. That means if your San Francisco office seems on the path to unionization, you can shift work to your Chennai office.

• It also means that, when the working conditions at a tech company suck, a lot of tech workers can easily jump ship. It’s hard to get a union going when your voters can easily quit and go work someplace nicer, rather than take the more difficult path of staying and trying to force your employer to improve.

Again, I think highly of unions and would really like to see more effective unionization efforts in tech – I just want folks to go into it eyes wide open and intelligently, vs throwing up their hands and saying, “Why don’t tech workers unionize?”

I’m guessing there was a fair amount of prompting scene by scene. It’s very impressive technically but it definitely falls flat at the moment

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That was fantastic, great watch

Here’s the thing though: I want the Fediverse to have enough scale so it’s got most of the content I want, and I can spend most of my time here.

Otherwise I’m still relying on Reddit, etc – so I want scale.

So here’s the thing: there are quite a few free and open source technologies Google adopted that have remained free and open source… I’m not convinced Google was trying to kill XMPP, and even if it were, the fact that corporations can often successfully kill non proprietary standards isn’t a great argument against wanting corporations to adopt those standards.

If content from Threads is available to the Fediverse and vice versa, then there is certainly a risk that 95% of users end up on Threads (e.g., because the sign up experience is better, because it’s conceptually simpler for the non tech savvy, and so on) … And that, by defederating, Threads could force the remaining 5% to move to Threads to continue seeing content.

The issue with that threat is that it has nothing to do with Threads federating. Guess what? The moment Threads launched, it had 5x as many users as Lemmy does. If simply being big and having a lot of content is what allows a platform to scale to the point that it can use the network effect to kill competition, large social media companies have that advantage whether they federate or not.

Worried that Threads will launch features that aren’t accessible unless you’re on their instance? Well, if they aren’t federated… That’ll happen anyway.

What Threads joining the Fediverse does, is provide ~1M users on the fediverse access to content from ~5M more users, and means that everyone leaving a platform like Reddit in favor of a platform like Lemmy sees more content. That is 5x more helpful to getting Lemmy to scale than it is for Threads.

Don’t worry, PwC will make a ton of money when they’re asked to help cut costs after this crashes and burns.