i’ll join the voices saying this is bad for the fediverse, and bad for users in general. there are LOTS of normie users who are joining threads who will be shut off from learning about all the cool other servers if everyone blocks them. this will mean users who want to interact with them need to sign up on Threads, which is what we don’t want.
what we want is that users on Threads see other servers, learn that they’re better, and migrate over.
don’t block Threads, show them how much better we are.
Do you honestly think only the positive, friendly people would hop over? The entire fediverse will be overrun by crazy political conspiracy theories and hostile homophobic/transphobic/anti abortion stuff in no time.
what exactly is stopping people from doing that regardless of what meta does with threads?
Meta deliberately provokes that kind of stuff since rage baiting is good for engagement. They’ve cultivated and minmaxed that kind of behaviour for years. I’m sure it exists in small pockets here already, but nowhere near the same level.
Honestly, after literally over 30 years on the internet, I can safely say that this idea of bringing everyone together into one space, that will make both the space and the people better, does not work. Even back in the 90s it affected the signal to noise ratio badly. Now there are significant sets of bad actors, shitposting/meta and general noisy ignorance and hate that can easily, easily drown out any decent signal. It’s like a permanent Eternal September.
Think of this like the subject of tolerance - typically criticised that as a philosophy, in that it would thus tolerate the very things that would undermine and destroy it. Rather, it is not a philosophy, but a social contract - if you don’t use tolerance yourself, others are not bound to be tolerant of you. Of course, I’m not talking about being tolerant/intolerant here, but using the quality of engagement and participation in a community, as a barometer for whether that user should be engaged in that community.
Some barriers to entry are self-selection for appropriate users, and therefore a good thing - whether through obscurity, level of engagement, education or whatever. Without these, everything gets overrun and crushed. We haven’t yet found a good self-moderating system for online communities that provides everyone with a positive and fulfilling experience.
Threads can be Threads. The fediverse can be the fediverse. No-one is forced to choose just one, and trying to force them together is going to crush the fediverse. Lemmy has about 20,000 active users. Threads got 30 million signups in 24 hours.
The entire fucking point of fediverse is that corporations can be disconnected when they try to come knocking. You’re literally arguing against the reason the platform exists to begin with.
this is not the point of the fedeverse, this is you’re own angry brain trying to force the general public to agree with you without wanting to explain to them the whole situation.
Given that I’ve been here for three years and you’ve been here 20 days I’m going to say I know a little bit more about it.
You’re missing the bigger picture. If threads is federating with the fediverse, then that means Zuck is downloading and indexing a copy of everyone else’s posts OUTSIDE of threads.
And defederating/blocking them won’t stop that. This just blocks the consumption of and interaction with threads content. Threads will still be able to see content on those servers. In much the same way that Lemmy.world users can still see beehaw content, despite beehaw defederating.
Fundimentally none of the data on here is private, it’s not designed to be private.
Sure but that doesn’t mean your instances should just hand your posts over to Meta??? And other people here are wrong, maybe lemmy does it differently, but on Mastodon when you defederate from an instance, your instance stops communicating with that instance entirely, rejecting all attempts to exchange information from that server. Anything the suspended instance saw before the suspension sticks around, but that’s basically it. If they never get a chance to even see the information, then the server essentially gets nothing.
Why can’t Meta (or any other shady company/ organization) do that now anyway. Just set up an innocent looking server, populate it with a small number of accounts to make it look legitimate, federate and start sucking in data. Do you really think every single federated server is run by people with hearts of gold and pure intentions? Your shit is already getting harvested, there’s no stopping that. They don’t need Threads if all they want is to index posts.
Meta sucks, I get it, but I think a lot of the fear Threads is generating is way overblown.
I’ve been on the fediverse since 2017. Anyone who’s dealt with running an instance knows how much of a pain in the ass dealing with huge monolithic instances is.
Recently on Mastodon for example, Mastodon.social has had huge spam waves of bots creating accounts on it then randomly sending replies with spam links to anyone they can find. And of course because Mastodon.Social is a huge instance with not enough moderators, people on outside instances can’t really do anything except whack-a-mole with the constantly new accounts since the “flagship instance” has open registration. At one point the instance I use now had to suspend mastodon.social temporarily to make the spam wave stop, which of course screwed up everyone’s follows.
The best part of Mastodon is the federated nature of the network, which gets completely screwed up when you have mountains of people on a handful of “too-big-to-suspend” instances rather than have people spread out across hundreds-thousands of smaller spaces.
999/1000 users won’t do any research on how ‘this new fb thing’ actually works beyond ‘where can I sign up’. All they want is a stream of content which the greater fediverse provides free of charge. It is going to be the whole Reddit situation with one more step. Portray yourself as the shining beacon of love and liberty, slowly start creeping in more monetisation and then build a wall once you get big enough. Meta and the overwhelming majority of the user base don’t care who is morally ‘better’. That’s not how capitalism works.
