Context
- List of instances defederating from Threads, the Meta microblogging platform: https://fedipact.veganism.social/
- At the moment, Threads have incomplete federation with Fediverse microblogging instances: https://fediversereport.com/last-week-in-fediverse-ep-86/
- Another meme about Threads: https://feddit.uk/post/18194873
- Threads does not currently federate with link aggregators (Lemmy, Piefed)
- Threads could work with the microblogging part of Mbin
The main arguments for people to defederate are
- “Embrace, extend, and extinguish” strategy: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
- A potential federation with Threads (should Thread decide to implement it) would overwhelm Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed with millions of users (compared to the 40k monthly current active users), transforming those platforms into a threaded version of Facebook
- Defederating preventively costs nothing
LW stance: https://lemmy.world/post/1274909?scrollToComments=true
Exactly. I still don’t know what the whole kerfuffle is about.
One concern is that since threads has a massive userbase and similar volume of content, it is basically a full reservoir and when it starts to federate content it will be like the dam bursting. Even if there is a need for a user on lemmy.world to do something to start federating content, like subscribing to communities, but all it would take is a bot that subscribes to a bunch of popular content to both fill the All feed and prompt a massive number of API calls.
If the hardware is up to the task, the other concern is the threads content overwhelming existing communities, and since a bunch of meta content is bot driven and malicious that would be a crazy amount of moderation that is likely needed to keep it from causing issues and driving away the existing userbase.
Lemmy is niche and therefore is heavily populated by techies but more specifically lemmy is open source so these techies are specifically the type who like open source stuff. Threads and the corporation responsible for it have a financial incentive to oppose open source projects like this. So the community most ideologically tied to lemmy want nothing to do with it. They want to preserve their space that they have made as free of the influences of capital as possible. The very existence of threads is a threat.
There’s lots of things I’ve never witnessed but is against as a matter of principle.
It’s about literally nothing. People just (rightfully) hate Meta so they cry wolf for no reason. Try looking for Meta users on Mastodon, you won’t find almost any. Most thread users don’t know what the fediverse is, don’t care about it and don’t want to know. Threads has likely already more users than the whole fediverse. Their base is already bigger of what they should theoretically “expand and extinguish”. There is absolutely no reason for them to care about the fediverse more other than some niche PR.
The EEE case never made sense from the beginning in this context, but people are still repeating it like a mantra. They are taking an emotional approach to a rational issue. Funnily enough, many of them are probably unable to understand how people could vote for Trump…
Also I don’t understand the problem at all. It’s not like instances can’t defererate later if an issue arise. We were the niche from the start, and they already had all the users they could ever need. And ongoing project was just easier to implement compared to developing a platform from scratch, that’s all.