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[Discussion] Pre-emptive Threads defederation
(sh.itjust.works)
Should sh.itjust.works preemptively defederate from Threads?
Threads is the not-so-new ~~reddit-like~~ twitter-like public forum platform by Meta, the same commercial company behind internet behemoths like Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp. They're working on ActivityPub integration so that they can bridge (federate?) with the fediverse. As far as I know, the focus is on Mastodon instances, but in the future that could include Lemmy instances too.
Some have raised the question, worried about the future of the fediverse or even claiming that it goes against its definition.
What do you think should be done?
EDIT: correction
EDIT.2: The Vote is on! Go make your voice heard. You have until Friday the 29th.
If threads had decent content, why are they federating?
Unless we get access to internal documents from Meta, we can only guess at their reasoning.
As such, their goal shouldn't directly factor into our decision. If federating with Threads is good for our community, we should do it. If it's bad, we should either not do it, or defederate.
I still haven't seen any reasons anyone thought were positive besides more people.
More people is pretty significant. AFAIU the Lemmy monthly user base is in slow decline.
At this point, most of my Everywhere feed is bots with occasional posts from people. A minority of posts have comments. I see the same few dozen users commenting on stories.
Granted, that's an effect of the instances my host pulls from, but it seems like a bad sign.
You could make the argument that Threads users might have different interests, but (IMO) that's secondary to the lack of organic content.
It's not in serious decline though, I don't know what numbers you're talking about. Also, Meta lost 80% in their first month, which I think would make them 20 million users. I looked the other day to find actual numbers, they must be super low because I couldn't find any, zilch, nada that were current. We're at around 1.5 million, we're doing fine. Next reddit fuck-up will probably double it. We honestly couldn't handle too much more anyway plus threads doesn't provide us any with content, we're the zoo.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=12
The "Active Users Monthly" stat shows a slow decline after the Reddit migration.
Posts by month is going up, as is comments. Which is good.
I wonder how much information they can farm by federating? Facebook and Twitter both have recorded history of significant federal government involvement in their platforms, and collect an ungodly amount of information for commercial purposes too.
Is there any useful information they could gather if federated that they can't just gather with crawlers?
Not clear but I imagine a decent amount can get crawled. Honestly I think the much bigger threat is the history of big tech using EEE to crush any potential competition.