Should sh.itjust.works preemptively defederate from Threads?

Threads is the not-so-new reddit-like twitter-like public forum platform by Meta, the same commercial company behind internet behemoths like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. They’re working on ActivityPub integration so that they can bridge (federate?) with the fediverse. As far as I know, the focus is on Mastodon instances, but in the future that could include Lemmy instances too.

Some have raised the question, worried about the future of the fediverse or even claiming that it goes against its definition.

What do you think should be done?

EDIT: correction

EDIT.2: The Vote is on! Go make your voice heard. You have until Friday the 29th.

Fediverse instances’ status on federation with Threads

  • Rosco
    134·
    1 year ago

    Wait and see. As much as I hate Meta, i don’t think we have much to gain by being a walled garden. Maybe we have also much to lose if we federate, who knows. I would not complain much if we defederate. If we do federate, there should be a zero-tolerance policy. If Meta tries some bullshit, or if there’s the slightest doubt, we should defederate immediately.

    • sbvEnglish
      63·
      1 year ago

      This. Lemmy feels too small. If we get decent content from Threads, it’ll be a boost to our communities.

      • pelespirit
        21·
        1 year ago

        If threads had decent content, why are they federating?

        • sbvEnglish
          31·
          1 year ago

          Unless we get access to internal documents from Meta, we can only guess at their reasoning.

          As such, their goal shouldn’t directly factor into our decision. If federating with Threads is good for our community, we should do it. If it’s bad, we should either not do it, or defederate.

          • pelespirit
            3·
            1 year ago

            I still haven’t seen any reasons anyone thought were positive besides more people.

            • sbvEnglish
              63·
              1 year ago

              More people is pretty significant. AFAIU the Lemmy monthly user base is in slow decline.

              At this point, most of my Everywhere feed is bots with occasional posts from people. A minority of posts have comments. I see the same few dozen users commenting on stories.

              Granted, that’s an effect of the instances my host pulls from, but it seems like a bad sign.

              You could make the argument that Threads users might have different interests, but (IMO) that’s secondary to the lack of organic content.

              • pelespirit
                2·
                1 year ago

                It’s not in serious decline though, I don’t know what numbers you’re talking about. Also, Meta lost 80% in their first month, which I think would make them 20 million users. I looked the other day to find actual numbers, they must be super low because I couldn’t find any, zilch, nada that were current. We’re at around 1.5 million, we’re doing fine. Next reddit fuck-up will probably double it. We honestly couldn’t handle too much more anyway plus threads doesn’t provide us any with content, we’re the zoo.

        • CancerMancer
          31·
          1 year ago

          I wonder how much information they can farm by federating? Facebook and Twitter both have recorded history of significant federal government involvement in their platforms, and collect an ungodly amount of information for commercial purposes too.

          • starman2112
            2·
            1 year ago

            Is there any useful information they could gather if federated that they can’t just gather with crawlers?

            • CancerMancer
              21·
              1 year ago

              Not clear but I imagine a decent amount can get crawled. Honestly I think the much bigger threat is the history of big tech using EEE to crush any potential competition.