A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and the threat of an EEE attack. This will probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.
People also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don’t have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.
What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it’d be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.
What actions can we take to deal with Threads?
I disagree with this. You’re saying we should watch Meta invade and profit off the fediverse and do nothing? Just because it’s an open standard doesn’t mean we should watch and let it happen, defederating is retaliation. The fediverse isn’t going to succeed by people doing nothing and watching others ruin it.
We’ve seen this happen. Many times. If the fediverse admins are going to repeat the mistakes of other standards then it’s going to slowly get worse until people do another standard and do it all over again.
What I’m saying is that if there’s always this constant corporate threat, if there’s the functional possibility of it happening, then it will eventually happen. If not Meta, then Musk, or god forbid Trump. Having to constantly “defend” against a mega instance does not seem like a sustainable future for the platform. That said I don’t think this is even an issue. There will always be instances that fundamentally don’t and won’t federate with Threads and other potential big players, so just go there. That’s kinda the point of this whole thing isn’t it? Activitypub and Lemmy/Mastodon won’t go away just because most people are somewhere else.
What can we do as user though? Other than whining which make instance admins and moderators job more difficult, we can only do very few things to stop meta. Fediverse is free, it is better for us users quietly migrate away from instance that don’t align with our value (in both ways) than harrasing instance admins. At worst it will make admins rage-quit then all of sudden your (or our) instance is gone like that mastodon.online…
I didn’t say we should harass admins, I’m saying it’s up to us as a community to either move to an instance that defederates or if you know what you’re doing, stay on an instance that does federate and don’t add content to Threads. Lurking is okay, but posting there means you’re adding value to them and taking away from local communities and slowly rendering other instances irrelevant.
It bothers me that after leaving for-profit social media, a lot of people here are totally fine going straight back to them. Have we really learned nothing?
I don’t imply that it is you, but the harrassment did happened.
I think it is different, when we use their services on their platform, they are our lords. They can do anything to our content and identity there with little to no retaliation potential. When we interact with them using fediverse, we can hold our ground and control what data we cede to them to interact with their users.
Nobody1 ever learns. Anything. Ever. Especially not from past mistakes.
1 Where those who do are so small in number as to basically be a quantum fluctuation’s worth