Meh, federated or defederated, threads poses only the first challenge to the fediverse. There will be other players with their own incentives that will join via ActivityPub, add their own custom features incompatible with the broader world, and entice users with slicker interfaces. Fediverse will need to show it can weather it, especially hard with the network effects of the larger corporations’ user bases.

My hope is the pressure will keep open services innovating to better compete and result in a richer experience for everyone.

Good resources, thanks for sharing. LLMs are becoming less niche by the minute so I wouldn’t be surprised if this post had some staying power.

I can certainly see the trade-offs. I typically write high performance optimizers, so my dependency list is fairly compact; the big risk I see in general, without knowing anything of you application, is bug fixes or quality of life improvements. Those that manifest as full version bumps are fairly insidious with ‘*’, and can make porting to the future a potential nightmare.

All that said, there’s something nice about using a fixed version of common crates to develop against. One of the big advantages of languages like Python and Go is that robust stdlib which makes many tasks trivial to program assuming a wide enough coverage of libraries.