I got a number of answers that sound very weak to me, and basically point to a “fail” of the fediverse in its own nature if threads joins. Kind of disappointing.

To me, the key idea of the fediverse is that it’s federated and should work as a whole, no matter who joins. Most of the answers below support the opposite. They are basically saying that the fediverse should stay within the “fediverse”, which is exactly what non-federated social media are doing. Meh.

Aside from the “moral” argument, can someone ELI5 what harm can a federated threads.net do on other users (like me) and/or instances?

The “never obsolete” refers to a subscription service, where they would periodically send you updates somehow. LGR has a good video on this.

So can banks in the UK. There is one design for England, but a few for Scotland, for example.

The bar is pretty low.

I don’t think so, because forcing users to post means shitposting.

I can understand. After the initial excitement, the content is lacuster and scarse compared to reddit (due to lack of large userbase)

Agree, and I think hashtags (or similar) are very important unless you are literally just interested in the current toots only, or you check Mastodon every minute.

Most are twitter mirroring bots, which means it’s OK to follow but there will not be much engagement.