Fediverse

It should be the users choice to block Threads, not the federation. What does Meta loose in getting defederated, they're already able to scrape like everyone else, you're just going to inconvenience users wanting an alternative. Some people want to see thread posts while also avoiding the data hell Meta is. Mastodon is a great way to do that and because of this will gain tons of users. Defederating will only gain meta more users since it took away the alternative option. Not everyone cares about the ecosystem like Facebook and Instagram but love twitter and need that addiction fix. The very small amount of users on mastodon will not make a dent in the profits of Meta at all.

I have set up a Mastodon account and love the concept but feel like its mostly anonymous twitter. Reddit and Lemmy do a much better job of providing a platform for mostly anonymous interaction than twitter, which has always been successful for its ability to allow regular people to follow/interact with more public people, which Mastodon is mostly lacking. If those more public people move to threads and if the activitypub integration works well, I would be able to use Mastodon to follow the people I follow on Twitter and get rid of twitter while using a privacy honoring instance and that would make the use case for Mastodon much stronger. I understand the concerns with EEE and don't intend to set up a threads account, but it seems like if Mastodon is going to get extinguished by Meta defederating is not really going to impact it much... They can still extend the capability to pull people away.

I talked to this one pro-Meta federation person yesterday who was really hung up on the fact that they'd be able to hang out with their Meta friends on a more privacy aware fediverse app. I tried to explain how EEE would work in the context of lemmy, and how their privacy dream is all a moot point because Meta will inevitably kill the fediverse and force them to Threads in the end, but the other person just kept going "yeah yeah, I get that... but if we federate, then I'll be able to hang out with my Meta friends."

I don't know, they just had tunnel vision about being able to hang out with their friends, or were in the denial stage of grief about EEE or something.

I think federating isn't necessarily a bad thing. In the worst case Meta will remove ActivityPub from Threads in the future. Threads federating is an opportunity for regular people to see and understand the Fediverse, and we get to see the more mainstream influencers. If it turns out Threads has malicious intent, defederate and hopefully the backlash will get thread users to migrate to another federated instance.