After moving here from lemmy.world after learning of their view on federation with Threads, I now face a dilemma which I do not have a clear answer to.

Should I continue contributing to my niche communities on Instances federating with Threads, or build similar communities on other Instances blocking Threads?

I have a feeing this issue is not a one off, but a common one going forward, so it’s better to settle it once and for all. Below is my thought so far. What would you do in my case?

I love to post or comment on my favourite niche communities to share my experience with others and grow them. Those communities are small in size and they usually exist in certain instances only.

One one hand, having everyone in the same place would be much more beneficial since the community is not split and spread across the fediverse. We would also have better discussions with people from different background and diverse point of views.

On the other hand, I do not feel my contribution is in the right place anymore, if let’s say I post on lemmy.world. I don’t want Threads to benefit from my posts/comments and I want people to join Lemmy. Why would Threads users join Lemmy if they could subsribe to our communities?

I wish my communities were instance-independent so this barrier can be removed. I can create a similar community here but it is the last thing I would want to do.

Having written all these down, I realised this was exactly the same situation how I came to Lemmy from reddit, i.e. communities split across Internet due to issues we have with the platform/instance we are on. I guess discussion on platform/instance-independent communities can be a topic of its own

Edit: formatting and clarified my points and updated my question to reflect that

  • tenthOP
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    1 year ago

    According to Lemmy documentation, if they don’t block a server, it means they are federating (aka talking using ActivityPub protocol) with that server.

    Lemmy has three types of federation:

    • Allowlist: Explicitly list instances to connect to.
    • BlockList: Explicitly list instances to not connect to. Federation is open to all other instances.
    • Open: Federate with all potential instances.

    Federation is enabled by default.

    It means Meta could in theory talking right now with instances not blocking them as part of their testing.

    I don’t know why they could not just block in the first place, then unblock/allow later if it makes sense.