You’ll probably have heard about Meta’s Threads which is a Twitter replacement running on Activity Pub - that means that it can and likely will federate with the rest of the Fediverse.

There are strong feelings about this, from petition: Defederate any instances that federates with threads proactivly , add threads.net on blocklists everywhere., citing the triple E problem. Then there are other opinions where it’s worth creating a place for everyone and having access to the Threads content from the Fediverse without using the Threads interface.

My initial thought here is to wait and see. I don’t think immediate action is going to matter all that much and defederation literally takes a few clicks. This is a tiny instance and one of its strengths is being able to connect to everyone else.

What are your thoughts?

  • WARPed1701D@wayfarershaven.euEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I didn’t know about Threads being part of the Fediverse.

    Personally I’m not a fan of Meta getting its slippery data mining tendrils into everything. I’ve never been a big social media fan and while I have had FB and Twitter accounts I rarely posted to FB and only used Twitter as an information aggregator. I left them all because I found them to be hugely destructive to society and worrying in terms of data privacy. I did not want to support their business model or give up my privacy.

    I like that the Fediverse is, right now, free of big corporate. I’d hate to see it be swallowed by it via EEE. If I felt my data was winding up in Meta’s hands I’d have to leave.

    The opinions and suggested actions on this are diverse. I can see that preemptive defederation of threads instances and any instance that federates with threads risks shattering Fediverse and being an act of self destruction before Meta can do it themselves. Similarly I don’t want Threads to get its foot in the door as that is probably all it needs to start its march of destruction. The only real solution is if every instance blanket blocked Meta instances in unison, but that won’t happen.

    Waiting is probably the best course of action right now but defederation of some kind should be performed at the first sign of trouble.

    • HSL@wayfarershaven.euOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’ve recently learned that while the Threads server is using Activitypub, it’s currently a closed garden and not open to federation. So this whole thing may be moot.

      Thanks for sharing your thoughts!