I have a lot of friends on Twitter who are now migrating to Threads. They are not going to come to the Fediverse no matter how much I annoy them. Federating with Threads will allow me to interact with them.

Also if the Fediverse works with Threads, a few of those people might come over.

My personal opinion is that I think large instances should "take one for the team" and suffer through federation with threads, at least in the beginning.

It's no secret that the fediverse still has a (shrinking) content gap with the centralized alternatives. Exposing potential users to our content is really the only way to get a critical mass of users. While there has been an explosion of content, a quick perusal of niche communities demonstrates that we have not yet reached the critical point.

So ultimately, I think that at least one of the large instances, i.e. lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, or Lemm.ee, should be tasked to suffer for the greater community, for a while.

I’m not saying lemm.ee shouldn’t defederate but I think we should take a wait and see what happens approach. As you mentioned they aren’t even supported by Activity Pub yet. Let’s see where it goes.

I downvoted but I’m not opposed to defense rating in the future should they prove to be as evil as we suspect.

I am personally against defederaring from Threads.

Facebook is completely driven by ad revenue. There is nothing stopping them from sending out ads as posts/comments with artificially inflated scores, which would ensure that their ads end up on the "all" page of federated servers.

If Facebook goes out of their way to push ads like that then yes, defederation is perfectly justified and invalidates everything else. However, there's no way to know what they will actually do until they do it. While at the moment it doesn't have ads, it obviously will in the future. But will those ads be actual posts, or just shown in the Threads UI? Can the users interact with them? What if they are posts, but without artificially inflated counts, so they'll have less interaction than regular posts anyway.

Threads already has more users than all Lemmy instances combined. Even if their algorithms don't apply to the rest of the fediverse directly, they can still completely dictate what the "all" page will look like for all instances by simply controlling what their own users see and vote on.

If other fediverse users can see posts on Threads, it works the other way around too. Threads users will be able to interact with posts outside of it. "But they'll only show posts from other Threads users!!", until a user wants to follow someone not on Threads. Yes, that number is shrinking, but it doesn't have to once they federate. You can simply not make an account on Threads, users on Threads will follow you just fine, and you will show up next to everyone else. Threads may be a majority, but it won't be all of it.

Hell, having a Threads majority might not be a good thing. What if the content is good? What if it's stuff you actually want to see?

Moderation does not seem to be a priority for Threads so far, meaning that they would create massive moderation workloads for smaller instances.

...i don't really see how that's the case. Since using Threads requires an Instagram account, that's already an okay protection against bots. As for trolls, you can use the federation to your advantage, to make tools on non-Threads platforms like bots to handle it. If anything, the main Threads instance itself will be way less moderated than smaller ones. Also the only difference between trolls/bots on Threads and other platforms is the amount, you can do bad shit here too.

In general, Facebook has shown countless times that they don't have their users best interests in mind. They view users as something to exploit for revenue. There are probably ways they are already thinking about hurting the fediverse that we can't even imagine yet.

Then don't use Threads itself. That's the entire fucking point of the Fediverse. You can use whatdver instance you want. If you don't use Meta's instance, all they can collect is publically available data they could get without the existence of Threads no issue. They cant shove in ads that aren't actual posts which likely won't get interactions and can be blocked, and if they put ads as actual posts with inflated numbers then it's perfectly fair to defederate. Assuming they go the EEE route, you can still enjoy Threads while it's at the first E, and then not follow with them when they go for the 2nd.

However

By defederating, you're locking out everyone on Threads. While that might sound like a good thing to some, that's still thousands if not millions of people that would be interested in the content here and would post. There's a good chance they won't know they can just make an account somewhere else, and just miss out. Why punish the user for what the company did?

You should at least give Threads a chance, at least as an early bird before they look into ads. When they start turning it profitable, then is the actual discussion for whether you should defederate, which will likely go through. We could even take this as an occasion to get Threads users off of Threads, off of Facebook.

Or I could just be a clown for giving Meta a chance. Only the future will tell

Edit: I have since changed my mind on this, and I want to explain why

I forgot we're talking about Meta here. Obviously they won't make this in a way that's mutually beneficial. They want to make money off of it. So when time comes to ad adds, they'll obviously make sure everyone sees them. And if we keep them for now, when we inevitability have to federate because Threads becomes profit driven, things will suck way more than if we never federated, because users from over here will lose access to content they were interested in on Threads, and vice versa. By embracing the first E, all we're doing is welcoming Facebook in the one place meant to keep distance from them.

I completely forgot the point of the fediverse is for it to not be controlled by a single entity. And while Threads can't replace the fediverse, they can definitely conquer it, and since we're talking about Meta, if they can they will, and Mark "they trust me, dumb fucks" Zuckerberk will obviously find a way to monetize users on non-Threads fediverse if given the chance.

Why don’t we wait to see if they send out ads to other instances before we judge them for that behavior.

Stick to your rules. Defederate if you have to. Otherwise let the users decide if they want threads content in their feed.

I downvoted.

I get all the hate for meta and zuck, and I agree that they would only do so for their own commercial benefit, but I don't think we should defederate without seeing what federating means. Everyone here is instinctively panicking and running around like headless chickens without seeing what it would actually entail.

Threads is like mastodon. If federating with threads only means that threads users can participate in lemmy, I see that as an advantage for us.

If we were a mastodon instance, this conversation would be very different.