[Discussion] What is our stance on federation with Threads?
[Discussion] What is our stance on federation with Threads?
I've seen a lot of discussion about Threads around the fediverse and I believe our main instance community has had a few large discussions about it (here's a recent one).
I didn't see an Agora discussion post, so I'm making one.
Can we all discuss our opinions on whether we want this instance to remain federated with Threads or not and share our reasons? I'd appreciate it!
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Personally, I'm still somewhat on the fence, but leaning towards "do nothing".
Pro-defederation: Threads users will greatly reduce the quality of discussion (weak argument imho) and Meta's overall goal is likely an attempted takeover of the fediverse (more compelling).
Anti-defederation: Meta can't take over anything without user support, which means there's not really much reason to freak out. Any data they could get by being federated they could get anyway, so no issues there. If they do start actively damaging the fediverse, we can still defederate later. Finally, users being exposed to instances that don't run on Zuck's narcissism and greed might convince some people to jump ship.
Overall, I currently don't see a pathway to damage from Meta's participation in the fediverse, and I don't think we should be too hasty on this.
How does Meta do a "takeover of the fediverse"? The whole design of the fediverse prevents it from being controlled by any single entity.
People are mainly concerned about 'Embrace Extend Extinguish' which is a method large companies have used to disrupt open source communities in the past. Here's the wiki on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
You can see microsoft was big on using it to try to sabotage browser competition and later chat app competition. These days google is accused of doing the same browser competition sabotage.
So for social media this might look like: adding features to posts that only work on Threads, or possibly wrapping fediverse content in their ads / own comment section, and supressing the fediverse comment section / original creators.
I don't know that this will happen and if it does it will take awhile - the initial 'embrace' step is meant to be non-threatening for the communities being absorbed.