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
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.