I still haven't made up my mind about blocking Meta's #Threads, codenamed #Project92 or #P92, supposedly supporting #ActivityPub, should it actually launch. As far as I can see, it's basically "keeping the evil surveillance corp. out" vs "avoiding nerdy self-marginalization".
Both are fair points. I guess, it depends. But on what? For me, the key point is if Threads (or whatever its name) supports easy migration (as Mastodon does). If that's the case, I would prefer not to block it, as it could be an offramp from the walled garden. If this feature is omitted, then I would be much more open to blocking.
But in the end, this should not be a decision by the admins, but a collective one by the users of the instance. #fedipact#Project92
@festal
The issue is more complex than just 'surveillance' (which they don't need to join the fediverse to do). The fear is that they'll do basically what google and big providers did to email, which is now much more impractical to self host, by swamping out with sheer volume everyone else and being the big voice that ends up dictating the evolution of the fediverse to its own detriment, opportunistically grabbing more users and then cutting off support for little servers. There's a rumor circulating that they want to PAY big servers to federate with them, and demand that content meet their guidelines, which could obviously fuck over people as it would create a vicious cycle of dependency as big servers would become incentivized to do whatever they want in order to keep the cash flow going - you could no longer trust them, and I guarantee you big social companies will be tempted to start using advertisement bots and artificial upvotes on influencers and toxic controversy to increase clicks and engagement.
I dunno about you, but I don't want ads or upvote-bots in my fediverse or big servers becoming beholden to a for-profit corporation for money. We've seen where that story goes - worse and worse.
If they actually do pay big servers, I am all in favor of defederating immediately as that is a huge red flag to me. But so far it is just a rumor. If they behave well (which would mean not tolerating Neo-Nazis, which, y'know, twitter does) I could be okay with them getting a probationary entry.
The #Fediverse needs to learn some serious conflict resolution...
If we ever aspire to become a serious alternative to corporate platforms we can't continue with this behavior. Let me explain.
Two days ago someone created a "The_Donald" community of a well-known #Lemmy instance. Immediately there were cries for defederation, blocking, and suspicion about the admin letting racists run rampant on his instance.
Ultimately when the admin logged in they removed that community. But before they even had time to realize what was happening they were already being accused of stuff and if any instance heeded the call to block, it would have caused damage to the users who would have their subscriptions / follows severed.
Some users who've just arrived from Reddit and bring a fresh perspective are already wary of the shit show this can become.
That instance resisted massive blocks because it was large enough. But what if it was smaller? >>
With the upcoming #meta#Project92 Fediverse service, there has been a, well, robust discussion of how to avoid threats looming. Those advocating mass-preemptive defederation make three cases for it.
➡️ To avoid data mining ...which Defederation does virtually zero to avoid any big tech entity scraping all the fedi public social graph today - Want proof?
see: https://is.gd/q8U2pv
The next argument is about poorly moderated P92 user posts and ad spam.
Which I'll discuss next.
@tchambers
Linux is thriving because it's a community which survives by cooperating. Linux doesn't really compete with the proprietary OSes in the markets they dominate. But this is all rather academic to my original point. Imagine what the effect of a unified fediblock would be to Meta. It would ruin their unveil. Wouldn't that be fun?
@ophiocephalic
If they did a big push to their 1.6 billion IG users (who knows if they will but they could) literally days later they would still be larger then the entire monthly active user base of the Fedi - even if we did a full preemptive block.