It is expected to be 2-3 months before Threads is ready to federate (see link). There will, inevitably, be five different reactions from instances:
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Federate regardless (mostly the toxic instances everyone else blocks)
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Federate with extreme caution and good preparation (some instances with the resources and remit from their users)
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Defederate (wait and see)
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Defederate with the intention of staying defederated
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Defederate with all Threads-federated instances too
It’s all good. Instances should do what works best for them and people should make their home with the instances that have the moderation policies they want.
In the interests of instances which choose options 2 or 3, perhaps we could start to build a pre-emptive block list for known bad actors on Threads?
I’m not on it but I think a fair few people are? And there are various commentaries which name some of the obvious offenders.
From what I gather, EEE only works if:
- Fediverse users mass exodus to Threads
- Meta extends ActivityPub Standard so much that other FOSS projects couldn’t keep up.
I feel like defederating would not solve 1. If 2 happens, the fediverse would just defederate anyway.
(Ofc we have to think about the privacy risks of federations etc.
5, except fully neutral-ground instances (private ones used as personal access points or government instances for example)
Choice 2. 5 is ridiculous and more harmful to the fediverse than the worst case of EEE.
I frankly prefer options 4-5. There’s no evidence that Facebook will play nice and a lot of historical evidence that they won’t. I want to be on an instance willing to take the nuclear option if it comes to it.
Everyone is talking about defederating preemptively because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it’s much less likely to succeed.
Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can’t just copy Twitter - it has to be “Twitter, but better”. So, doing what any exec does, he looks for buzzwords and trends to make his new product more exciting. Hence the fediverse.
From Meta’s standpoint, they don’t need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I’m sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.
TL;DR below:
I agree. All the Fediverse is to the Silicon Valley firms is the current buzzword. Like you said; if- and to me, it’s a question of if and not when- Fediverse integration gets built into Threads, it’s gonna be limited. My bet is that somehow they’re gonna make it so that Threads instances can only federate with other Threads instances.
And that’s if it exists at all. I feel there’s a considerable chance that Meta just throws away the Fediverse integration idea. Either it’s too much effort for too little profit, or some new buzzword comes along for them to chase.
