As someone who deleted Facebook in 2012 and has zero intention of going back to any of Meta’s products… I don’t see a need to defederate and would prefer not to.
Hear me out… maybe i just am still figuring this whole fediverse thing out but I don’t see how it can be bad.
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If there are ads or otherwise bad content on threads, I’m not going to see it unless I actively go follow treads accounts. Like I still have trouble finding/following content across federated instances, basically going there, getting the name of a community, coming back here, and plugging it in.
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Any data they could mine about me they could get anyway since it’s either publicly available or not. They could just stave the fediverse under some other domain/IP that doesn’t even need to federate.
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In the event they try to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, they would just change the activity pub protocol in some way, at which point we would have two competing standards. Open source ActivityPub, as used by Mastadon, Lemmy, and the like… and Meta’s ActivityPub… if we don’t use theirs their extended (bad) version of the protocol, they essentially fork and we don’t get to see their content. So we’re just going to defederate now so they don’t have that carrot to dangle over us? Why not just know if they starts fundamentally changing the protocol we just let them break themselves back off from us? We don’t lose anything we aren’t giving up already by defederating.
The ONLY thing that fundamentally changes for me is I don’t get to follow any Threads accounts from the relative safety of the fediverse. At which point I probably have to bite the bullet and spin up my own dedicated instance so I can chose to not defederate. All that said I’m more concerned about this on the Mastadon side of things, as like you said it probably wouldn’t even integrate well with the Reddit style fediverse.
Thanks for the clarification. I think my though process would still hold true on the mastodon side of things but this is Lemmy and I didn’t think that through fully.
So even if I only view my subscribed communities on non-threads instances, Meta could be using their algorithm to show/suppress posts from our side and artificially boost the upvote count to put them at the top of our pages…
I’m still in the “wait and see” camp as they probably won’t integrate as much with Lemmy 🤷♂️