There’s a word for that too: “corporation” 🤷

On a wider scale, can’t spell “ethics” with “business practices” anyway.

Back on topic, Threads is only a problem for the “All” feed of federated instances with users senselessly following people from Threads, while defederating won’t stop Meta, or anyone, from syphoning and abusing any publicly available data from the Fediverse. Other than that, Meta’s algorithms have no power here, the Fediverse isn’t Meta’s playground even if all instances federated with Threads.

It’s literally a list of well-run servers. Do you not see how you’re attempting to ‘take away choice’ from the proprietors of the list by telling them who they must list and what criteria they must use for their website?

You’re perfectly capable of doing what they’ve done. Go spend the time to curate a list, put up a simple little site, and make your own decisions. Nobody’s stopping you. That’s the point of federation and independence. You get to do what you want if you have the follow-through.

Admins likewise can do whatever they like. They can choose to federate with threads or to not.

Personally, I think it’s a little shady to run around shaming people who put their time and effort into projects and insist that they must lick Meta’s boots. Little bit suspect.

Good points. Yes, I do prefer to give an instance at least the benefit of the doubt. Difference tho really with Fediverse is you have to search and follow stuff to see it. It does not get inserted into your feed through ads or people playing the algorithms. So generally I’m only seeing what I follow. I suppose we do need to choose our instances wisely. Certainly, if an instance (not just a user on it) is really spamming or impacting on other instances, I suppose there can be grounds to block it. But we have not all been spammed yet by Threads. I don’t like Threads (cancelled all my accounts years ago) but I left a few good friends and family there that I would like to reconnect with, and follow them. I also like that my metadata stays on the Fediverse side, so I don’t need a Threads account or their app tracking me.

I just would not like to be denied the option to even reconnect with my family and friends. Same goes for WhatsApp interoperating on Signal protocol - I have many friends and colleagues I left behind on WhatsApp, and would like to reconnect again with them.

If that’s true, I hate it.

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That being said, I acknowledge and agree that moderation is poor, which is, once again, why you should federate. To let people know they don’t need Meta. To show them how to escape the exploitation and harassment.

You’re gonna have to break this down for me, because I’m not seeing the logic.

So I’m a Threads user. I now start seeing Beehaw posts in my feed. Let’s say that I’m seeing them alongside Threads-originating posts containing “exploitation and harassment”. How does my seeing those Beehaw posts in Threads automatically translate to thinking, “I should leave Threads and join- not Beehaw, which is federated, but another, non-federated instance”?

Or are you advocating for individuals in non-Threads Fediverse instances to do some kind of manual outreach campaign?

The reason embracing works is because it creates connections between people using the system and allows them to piggyback off of other services.

At the moment, the wider fediverse may not have a ton of people, but the quality of content blows mainstream social media out of the water. By making it available through Threads, new users are going to be encouraged to follow their normal pattern of gravitating toward the big thing while still having access to this content. If we post on servers federated with Threads, every piece of content we add is a boon for Meta for absolutely free. The fact that they have deep pockets means they already have independent federation beat on the server end in terms of stability and long-term reliability. It makes a lot of sense for the average user to just grab a Threads account and not worry too much about which other instances have the odd hiccup or potentially stop existing.

On the other hand, if people exposed to the fediverse keep hearing about all this stuff that isn’t on Threads, there’s a better chance that they’ll get into the decentralized account model that’s natural to federation. The logical conclusion quickly becomes making accounts in places that are federated with the places you want to read and post, and if Threads isn’t connected to all those places it means it doesn’t serve to unify fediverse accounts under a corporate banner.

Threads has a resource advantage, but we have a content advantage. If we let Threads in, the content advantage dissolves, because not only do they gain access to fediverse content, they pollute it.

Thankfully the reality is that the choice will always lie with server owners, not via consensus. As long as the owners of servers with higher-quality content and better moderation don’t open the floodgates to Threads, that pocket of high quality content that a Threads account can’t have will always exist.

Personally, I suspect the above will be self-perpetuating, as connecting with a larger social media entity will degrade the quality of content. The best bits will always largely be inaccessible to the big sites.

Federating doesn’t prevent that either, but at least you won’t be rewarding them for it by engaging with them. If Meta wants to sink ActivityPub (or rather, subsume it), it will, and no actions we can take will prevent that, bar forking the standard in some way.

In fact, not federating with Threads is the only potential way to ensure that our instances don’t become reliant on functionality that Threads adds, even if we can’t save the ActivityPub standard itself.

The fact that I haven’t had anything equivalent to Pidgin or Trillian installed in over a decade says otherwise. When Facebook became big it literally wiped out the active userbase of 4 concurrently relevant instant messaging platforms.

As far as I can tell they seem to have at this point largely been supplanted by Discord.

Are you going to explain what UGC means?

“User-generated content”. Posts, comments, uploaded files, etc.

…why would they do that? Why would they introduce something new just to turn around and try to prevent you from using it?

Why would they try to prevent users from migrating away from their service? Are you seriously asking this?

The reason they’re federating is because of the Digital Markets Act. Same reason WhatsApp is going to interoperate.

LOL they only need us to comply with regulations.

You have asserted this in multiple comments, but the only site I can find asserting this link is a blog post by someone who admits to having only a “surface-level understanding” of DMA, and thinks that this is gaining them data portability.

As someone who works at a very large company that is also affected by DMA, this is not how any company whose legal teams we’ve spoken with are interpreting this requirement. Data portability is being solved with export standards, so that users can (more) easily migrate to other services. Streaming someone’s data over to another platform where they may or may not have an account, or ever intend to go, wouldn’t fulfill that requirement, because if the user wishes to move to a non-federated instance, that would not be possible. Portability also cannot be ‘favored’ under DMA.

That is a separate issue from interoperability, which only works if Threads is allowing federated instances to fully interact with their users’ posts, with no loss of functionality, which was at least originally not the plan.

Are you going to explain what UGC means?

I would guess he’s talking about “user-generated content”, given context (“they need us for content”).

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Wow, nobody had brought that up to me before. It looks like it has been around long enough that could actually be the consideration, the DMA having begun the process of becoming law in 2020.

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