That’s a big decision I won’t make without community input as it would affect all of us.
If we purely treated it as just another instance with no history then I believe our stance on it would be to allow them, as we are an allow-first type of instance. While there are plenty of people we might not want to interact with, that doesn’t mean we should immediately hit that defederate button.
When taking history into account it becomes a whole different story. One may lean towards just saying no without thought.
All of our content (Lemmy/Fediverse) is public by default (at the present time) searchable by anyone and even if I were to block all of the robots and crawlers it wouldn’t stop anyone from crawling one of the many other sites where all of that content is shared.
A recent feature being worked on is the private/local only communities. If a new Lemmy instance was created and they only used their local only communities, would we enact the same open first policy when their communities are closed for us to use? Or would we still allow them because they can still interact, view comments, vote and generate content for our communities etc?
What if someone created instances purely for profit? They create an instance corner stone piece of the “market” and then run ads? Or made their instance a subscription only instance where you have to pay per month for access?
What if there are instances right now federating with us and will use the comments and posts you make to create a shit-posting-post or to enhance their classification AI? (Obviously I would be personally annoyed, but we can’t stop them)
An analogy of what threads is would be to say threads is a local only fediverse instance like mastodon, with a block on replies. It restricts federation to their users in USA, Canada and Japan and Users cannot see when you comment/reply to their posts and will only see votes. They cannot see your posts either and only allow other fediverse users to follow threads users.
With all of that in mind if we were to continue with our open policy, you would be able to follow threads users and get information from them, but any comments would stay local to the instance that comments on the post (and wouldn’t make it back to threads).
While writing up to this point I was going to stay impartial… But I think the lack of two way communication is what tips the scales towards our next instance block. It might be a worthwhile for keeping up-to-date with people who are on threads who don’t understand what the fediverse is. But still enabled the feature because it gives their content a “wider reach” so to speak. But in the context of Reddthat and people expressing views and opinions, having one sided communication doesn’t match with what we are trying to achieve here.
PS: As we have started the discussion I’ll leave what I’ve said for the next week to allow everyone to reply and see what the rest of the community thinks before acting/ blocking them.
I am for blocking Threads. You mentioned history, and history shows that nothing good comes of playing ball with Zuckerberg. We are not a commodity to be used by billionaires, and I feel that the Fediverse exists to at least partially prevent that.
And as for public info, we can’t stop people from scraping the data in other ways, but we also don’t need to directly facilitate it by federating. Why make it easier for Zuck to get access to the data?
Lastly, no matter what he says, Zuck can’t be trusted. I’m almost certain the entire reason he wants to use ActivityPub in the first place is to either gain access to the kinds of people who have left Facebook and Twitter and commodify them, or to somehow maneuver in such a way that it kills or cripples the Fediverse.
Due to the huge difference in numbers between Threads and the Fediverse, if Threads implements groups (in a similar fashion to Mastodon), those would directly compete with Lemmy communities.
Once those communities are created and have millions of users, people will probably join them, as they have the most users. Once this is done, Threads could then implement new features and explain that they cannot federate anymore, forcing people to move to Threads. This article details what happened with XMPP and GChat: ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-ne…
We (users of Reddthat) already see the natural tendency of most of the users to gravitate towards the most populated instance (LW) and its communities. This trend would become exponential with the numbers difference between Threads and the Fediverse.
User voting is the best feature reddit ever had. I can’t even comprehend when Lemmy instances want downvotes removed. Do you not understand why Twitter is a flaming wreck on the altar of Engagemagog, while reddit was largely functional in spite of absentee landlords? Moderation is what keeps a forum from becoming 4chan - and users moderating each other is a great first approximation. Even sorting good stuff first and bad stuff later can be great for everyone, before removing a single comment or commenter.
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