I was a kid in the early 2000’s and I remember that page from the science book that we were reading during class, and it was also already alarming us about climate change/global warming. And like you said, here we are…

It’s not that they would necessarily cripple it, but they would “enhance” their instance of AP (the “extend” in EEE), “accidentally” making it incompatible with the rest of the Fediverse and thus creating an excuse to suddenly drop support for the Fediverse. At this point users in, say, Mastodon will have created some degree of dependency on users in Threads, and at that point people in there would be forced to move to Threads if they want to maintain a similar experience as before.

Can I ask you why do these examples not apply in your opinion? The XMPP one seems particularly fitting and actually maps perfectly to the Fediverse situation (so far), if I’m not missing anything.

Yes. And there are good reasons for that, as this user showed: https://lemmy.world/comment/884169

It’s just that email addresses are often linked to the owner’s name and I don’t feel too comfortable knowing that it’s in cleartext and easy to access without knowing it beforehand. Your advice is good though.

Oh whoops, I deleted my comment almost immediately but it seems like you could see it and answer anyway. Yeah makes sense that it’s not an all-instances thing, it was very weird UI-wise because it said “optional” but then the address still came back when I left it empty, saved and refreshed. Seems like they might have forgotten to remove the “optional” label (or remove the requirement, either of the two).

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