I saw memes about it and many comments against it but I was wondering if there was a list of instances whose admins already said they will / won’t federate with Meta’s Threads.
Or if there is a public discussion happening among admins to decide a common strategy or something.
Personally I’m a little worried about comments saying stuff like “if we federate with them I’m out of here” because I read the article by Mastodon CEO [1] and found it to be very reasonable. If someone doesn’t want to interact with Meta they won’t need to, even if other users on the same instance will do it. Or am I wrong?
I guess the risk is that Threads gets extra features and people from the Fediverse move to it thinking “I can still be part of the Fediverse even if I’m using Threads” and then suddendly Meta defederates and they are locked in. But I really don’t think many people from Lemmy / Kbin would switch in the first place so I guess that won’t be a huge problem.
I know many people who, when asked “what do you use Instagram for?”, told me they use it to follow the pages / people they like. And I think we can extrapolate that for these people being on Lemmy instead of Threads would make a little difference, if it still allows them to follow who they want. And they can be convinced with privacy concerns points. I’m not saying 90% of people, given the choice, would leave Meta for a FOSS alternative, hell not even 10% maybe, but I’m sure there’s a non-zero amount of people who would.
And, as the Mastodon CEO said, if Meta at a certain point decides to defederate we would be back to the point where we are now.
[1] https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
Someone linked this in another thread on the topic. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Well worth reading.
This article made me feeling sad.
It’s a good, and very scary, reading but I would argue that it does not directly translate here because Lemmy / Kbin and Reddit are not social media per se, they are content focused instead of being person focus. Here no one cares who you are, we are all here for content. The XMPP EEE succeeded because once defederated people were not able to talk to their friends, defederating Threads would cut us off from strangers and their content, it’s not a big deal.
We’ll see what happens, hopefully the Fediverse will not be another free social media attempt killed by greedy corporates.