defederating means that people who want to connect with someone on the platform are forced to install it. fuck that. not defederating gives people an alternative and shows them using the fediverse means they don't miss out on anything regardless of platform.

if I want to access threads content and I can do it using my existing fed account without installing their app and giving them access to my heartrate, microphone and bowel moton stats then frankly that's a win for us.

This is a good take, imo.

I never understood the privacy concerns. Well, I do insofar as it's safe to assume Meta is privacy-hostile. But many seem to think using Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. are some how "private" corners of the internet when they're anything but. It is very trivial for someone to access public data on fediverse sites as you've pointed out, and if they want that data they're going to get it.

The beauty of the fediverse is that we can choose who we trust with our core data, such as sign-up details, IP addresses, etc. Signing up to the Threads instance/app would be a disaster from a privacy perspective, but just treating them like any other server and taking advantage of the increased engagement from the content their large instance will post will likely increase content available on the fediverse and engagement across the board. Any decision to defederate with their instance(s) should purely be based on content and nothing more, imo. From a cross-server perspective, they're no different than any other large instance.

Thanks for laying this out. You persuaded me.

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that there's a lot of gatekeeping and shaming going on, especially against the Mastodon owners who are thinking about federating with Meta's instance.

Federating with Meta's servers should be a choice. If people want the ability to interact with celebrities and normies, that would be a huge boost to ActivityPub and Mastodon in general, especially for the servers that do end up federating with Meta. Their users would be able to interact and follow all of the mainstream people who are not on Mastodon.

It should be always be a choice. And for those servers that don't federate, things will remain the same. Don't try to gatekeep or spread FUD, it just makes you look paranoid and insular.