I’ve seen a lot of comments suggesting Threads should be pre-emptively defederated by Lemmy/kbin instances if it tries to join us. I’m a bit confused what the problem would be. When Meta does its usual corporate bullshit over at Threads, how would that hurt a user or community based on Lemmy.world? If anything, wouldn’t it give the fediverse a boost if Threads users start discovering communities outside of Meta’s control?
I presume I’m missing something, as you can probably tell I don’t fully understand how Lemmy, Threads or federation all work.
The old Tripple E is the problem…
Meta come in with open arms embracing ActivityPub. They use our established communities to supplement their own content, and draw in users that would never have heard of this place to sign up to Threads.
All’s going great. But over time they start extending what Threads can do past what ActivityPub can. This “accidentally” starts causing incompatibilities with ActivityPub, which could already cause some users to migrate to Threads.
Once they’ve done this enough, they use their generated incompatibilities as an excuse to defederate from the Fediverse. This forces anybody on this side that still wants to interact with the friends and content they’ve made through Threads to sign up over there leading to an exodus.
If that exodus is big enough, it could be enough to extinguish the Fediverse completely. Meta wins, we lose.
Meta doesn’t need Lemmy. They don’t care about Lemmy. Last time I checked they already had 10M+ users
They don’t need us, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want us.
We’re a market as much as any other, and by them explicitly saying they want to support ActivityPub (Mastodon in particular), they clearly do see us.
Pre-emtive Defederation is not the solution.
Maybe it isn’t the best solution long-term, but if we fully embrace them they will cannibalise us.
It’s silly to be optimistic when we’ve already seen EEE in action.