1y ago

What should we do about Threads?

A lot of people dislike it for the privacy nightmare that it is and feel the threat of an EEE attack. This will also probably not be the last time that a big corporation will insert itself in the Fediverse.

However, people also say that it will help get ActivityPub and the Fediverse go more mainstream and say that corporations don't have that much influence on the Fediverse since people are in control of their own servers.

What a lot of posts have in common is that they want some kind of action to be taken, whether it'd be mass defederating from Threads, or accept them in some way that does not harm the Fediverse as much.

What actions can we take to deal with Threads?

282 comments

Join the pact and not just vow but actually do defederate Threads as soon as it comes online: https://fedipact.online/
- i appreciate the message but what is that ui design???
  the floating hearts that go over the text. the neon pink background. the fact that this serious pact is in all lowercase (i know im typing in all lowercase, but i think the fedipact is different from an internet forum). the weird text animation for hyperlinks that makes it unreadable for a second. this does not lead to any reasonable credibility
  
  That is what nonconformity looks like. The internet of old looked similar to this. Nowadays, everything has ample whitespace, and is boringly styled, and ads everywhere.
  That would be how I look at this page.
- Why?
  
  There is literally a link on that page titled "why"...

Meh, federated or defederated, threads poses only the first challenge to the fediverse. There will be other players with their own incentives that will join via ActivityPub, add their own custom features incompatible with the broader world, and entice users with slicker interfaces. Fediverse will need to show it can weather it, especially hard with the network effects of the larger corporations' user bases.
My hope is the pressure will keep open services innovating to better compete and result in a richer experience for everyone.
- Best thing that could happen is that reddit would respond with a surprise "we too" will federate with you all, and implement activity pub. Then you have two big actors competing on an open playground. And we grab a drink and enjoy the light show.
  
  Honestly, the reason I left Reddit was the 3rd party api bullshit. If they suddenly federated and I could use Lemmy to subscribe to some of their communities / subs again without needing to be subjected to their bullshit ads and 1st party client bullshit, I’d welcome that.
  
  I mean Tumblr also wants to join the fediverse. They are smaller than Twitter, but still large to have some amount of influence.
- That’s an excellent take on the platform.
- Competition drives innovation. If something from a walled garden fediverse comes to the broader world as a result, awesome. I mean, if we could federate with Reddit for example, and I could access their subs content but not be subjected to their 1st party app and ads and karma and that’s the stuff on top of their instance, I don’t care what they do on their server.
  If anything it may introduce people as a gateway into the fediverse to begin with so when something happens on a corporate instance that pisses them off, they might feel compelled to look into the broader world around them. Not all, but some.
  I guess the only big concern most people have here is the Microsoft EEE.
- Excellent take.

Absolutely defederate from threads immediately from anything threads related.
Threads will collect any and all data they can about users disregarding which server you are on, and not agreeing to their business practices.
There's a reason they are not in the EU, including NI despite being in UK. And that's probably because their practices are illegal, and don't respect the rights of their users according to EU regulation.
The second Lemmy federates with Threads, I'm out of here.
- Fun fact - GDPR is about European persons, not European servers. If an European citizen has a fediverse account on an American/African/Asian/… server and Meta collects all of their data and processes it, they are still in violation of GDPR. Locking European (Instagram) accounts out of Threads doesn’t make them comply magically with GDPR.
  Good luck meta, have fun handling all those GDPR requests and proving that Europeans have consented that you suck up all their data…
  
  But if your company is not localized in EU how they will prosecute the company?
- What I do not understand about this take is that they can already collect all of this data, today. They don't need to federate with the rest of the Fediverse to scrape basically all of the data they want. The only problematic thing they'd need an instance for is linking votes to users - which is something they could do just by spinning up a Lemmy instance. And they probably shouldn't be able to, Lemmy should try to figure out a way to anonymize votes.
  Threads joining the Fediverse does not significantly increase their ability to collect data about existing Fediverse denizens.
  
  Yes you are right. They can. I wasn't thinking straight.
- I second this, the NI/RoI/EU situation with threads is proof to me that they are for sure doing threads for only the most shady/coporately greedy reasons.
  The fediverse isnt ready for widespread/user adoption. Not everything has to grow exponentially overnight (this is a big problem with modern culture IMO).
  Let the fediverse develop naturally and healthily, it will shine on its own in time.
- Threads will collect any and all data they can about users disregarding which server you are on
  Defederating doesn't solve this issue I think. It only stops the flow of data from Facebook to you but not the other way around.
  
  That's a bummer, hope EU will keep a keen eye on them then. Unfortunately USA and UK have a history of not doing shit.
- This is an absolutely awful take. Can you imagine if you had this approach with email? You wouldn't let your email server connect to a Gmail server or any other email server that connected to a Gmail server. That's insane and email becomes worthless.
  
  Not quite the same. Emails are for messages and communication between individuals, not an open internet forum with the idea of allowing people to converse and discuss freely. Its an attempt to bring back the internet golden age IMO. Allowing threads to federate opens the door to them benefiting from the content and work of the rest of the fediverse for free. This would be fine for a non scummy company, but meta will use this opportunity in the worst ways to gain power, influence, and money that they don't deserve. All the best of the fediverse (lemmy/kbin/mastodon) was made with FOSS principles in mind, bringing people together, letting everyone have a voice, not paywalling or involving money in absolutely everything. The only reason Facebook is here for is to make profit. We should not let them
  
  I know interoperability between email providers is often used to make the concept of federation more aproachable but other than that they are totally different systems.
  Your sent emails aren't published and not everyone with an email server can track your activity. Unlike lemmy if it connects to threads
  
  Yes, if all the MTA admins refused to SMTP with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo right from the start email would still work. Right now it doesn't. We don't want a repeat of that, so let's defederate from any big corp or anyone who federates with any such.
  If you don't, you're dead in the long run.
  
  Yeah people keep talking about open source and interoperability as this fragile thing that can be consumed by any sufficiently large player. It's supposed to be less fragile, it's supposed to be superior. If there is a bad reaction to adding such a large player, then learn from it and iterate solutions. Making tiny walled gardens has got to be the most boring experiment that I don't care to be a part of.
  Would be nice if instances had a default recommended block list, like how spam filters work. Nasty stuff is "blocked" but still accessible and I can move it out of spam if I so chose. Rather than defederating all the time

Ignore it. Defederate. Defederate with any instances that chose to federate with it. Keep the fediverse small and independent. It's nice here, let's keep it nice.
- Yeap. It doesn’t to go mainstream; it’s already successful.
- I keep asking but haven't gotten an answer, why must instances that block meta also block those that federate with META? Wouldn't blocking META be enough, as you wouldn't see their posta, nor users, nor comments in any way after blovking the domain?
  Is this punitive or is yhere a reason I'm mising?
  
  In a federated system, users on Alice can see and post into communities hosted on Bob, eg alice/c/funplace@bob. When Meta tries to join, Alice chooses not to federate - avoid giving meta free content, protect its users from 'bad' meta communities, preemptively block toxic meta users, whatever - but Bob does federate. Alice users can't see meta/c/advertising, there's no way to subscribe to Alice/c/advertising@meta. Both Alice and Meta users can see Bob/c/funplace, and so alice users can see anything that meta users post there and meta 'gets' any content that alice users contribute. Bob effectively acts like a tunnel between alice and meta users.
  
  I got the impression that somehow your activity 3rd hand can still be passed on via the intermediary instance to Threads, and then becomes part of their dataset. I could be wrong, I'm not sure how that information gets passed on in the backend.

It's a clear EEE attack. Do not federate!
- Exactly, Threads will use the Fediverse to seed content and then start to drift from the standard when they have sufficient user base that they don't need the outside content. They will start to shift all communities to be Meta-hosted and stop advertising the others. Eventually they will just disconnect entirely.
- I agree. If I want to see "VIPs", influencers, ads or other crap like that I can still register an account over there. Also Meta's track record is horrible..
  
  It's not easy to make an account unless you port over your Instagram account. I attempted to make two separate accounts, and both were suspended instantly and I couldn't continue unless I uploaded a selfie. But I didn't really want to use my name ¯⁠\⁠(⁠◉⁠‿⁠◉⁠)⁠/⁠¯
- Sorry, but I'm a bit out of the loop, what is an EEE attack? When I look it up all I get is eastern equine encephalitis, which I somehow doubt is related.
  
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
- I assume its Embrace, extend, and extinguish. Its something Microsoft is know for and this worried me when they started to "Embrace" Linux. However, I don't believe big tech can do much in terms of polluting open source and the fediverse.
  I dont follow this much but I can see that these companies are investing into what they think the future could look like.
  Might just be me...
  
  That's what they want you to think. (not sure if I'm being sarcastic or not)
  Even if that's true, once they become a part of the ecosystem, they will start looking for ways to dominate it. That's just the nature of for-profit corporations.
  
  I don't think you need to read too much into it.
  If Meta concludes that federated platforms or activitypub may one day start to eat their lunch, then the clear and obvious first step to any strategy is to have some sort of presence in the fediverse.
  Honestly that's as far as you need to go for the moment. Grab some market share and then avail yourself of opportunities as they arise.
  Perhaps it will be EEE, perhaps something else.
  
  Check out how XMPP was killed
- This makes zero sense. There is no financial incentive for an EEE attack, and these companies don't do anything without financial incentive.
  Your content isn't original or interesting enough for meta to want it, and even if they did, they already have access to it without federation.
  Threads on its own already dwarfs the entirety of the global fediverse by orders of magnitude. Anyone screaming EEE is just fucking stupid.

Some food for thought from Mastodon:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
- @panja
  Meta is going to kill the Fediverse and it's all probably a part of Zuck's grand plan.
  
  How would they kill it? I'm all for blocking them, but I'm not sure how could they kill Mastodon or other activitypub apps.
  
  I'm not sure how you know that?
  
  They're not going to kill it because we're not going to let them... what's with the nihilism? If you're gonna resign that easily just go ahead and download tiktok and instagram and give away all your data today.
- One of the worst parts from the "article" which is wildly misdirecting:
  According to the App Store listing for the Threads app, it collects a variety of data, which stands out in comparison to the Mastodon app, which collects none. However, this affects only those who download and use the Threads app,
  This is most probably decidedly false. Meta has always and will probably continue to collects whatever data they can, they build databases of relations, and collect not only on their users, but also the people their users have contact with.
  If you write a message to a Threads user, you can be pretty sure as much as possible from that message is collected. Not just the message, but also any metadata that can be used to identify you and any context you are in.
  
  Meta gets all the data as well, even if all people defederate.
  ActivityPub has it in the name. All your activities in the fediverse are public.
  The article talks about private data saved on your phone like health data, contacts etc. Threads takes those, Mastodon app does not.
- Eugen's naïveté is going to destroy this whole platform.
  
  Yeah, I'd like to see an actual explanation of why the Fediverse is insulated from EEE aside from 'Mastodon brand recognition'.
- For example, we cache and reprocess images and videos for you to view, so that the originating server cannot get your IP address, browser name, or time of access.
  Yes, isolate me from those scary non-Threads instances daddy

How so many people seem to brush this off is beyond me. As far as I'm concerned the purpose of federated, decentralized services is being in charge of who to trust and huge corporations not controlling or monitoring every part of your online activity.
Obviously as soon as Meta starts dealing with ActivityPub and Fediverse, the overwhelming majority of users will flock to their servers. They will be more userfriendly and responsive. In effect they will also hold the overwhelming majority of content and data. Just a matter of time till most of the other instances will become obsolete, due to bandwith regulations or smth similar,
The fediverse will be rebranded as the "Threadiverse"
- Basically "embrace, extend, extinguish" in a nutshell.
- Obviously as soon as Meta starts dealing with ActivityPub and Fediverse, the overwhelming majority of users will flock to their servers.
  Very few people here will go there. They would gets lots of new people, with or without being part of Fedverse. And they would likely only do the Mastodon like part of Fedverse.

Just: We absolutely must wall off Meta.

I think we should defederate any corp version of any federated app. Not due to privacy or anything, but because it silos anyone using those services from everyone else. Bluntly, I don't want people's B.S. propeganda on the fediverse, and the stupid crap conspiracy farm that Facebook and other places have become.
I'm sure it won't stop the stupid from reaching us, but it should limit the amount and impact that those users have. Additionally, it will remove a lot of high quality content from those services making them less viable for corps to run and maintain. They will happily farm the fediverse for content to attract users they can monitize.... I'm not a fan of handing them more content to steal while they share zero of the profits of that content with either the creators or the communities that handle that data.
I'm not doing their job for them in promoting entertaining and informative posts just so they can make money on it. They want it, they can put forth the effort themselves.
- Put another way, given the size of Meta and its userbase, it's completely infeasible for a typical instance to moderate on their behalf, so defederating due to insufficient moderation makes sense. Just like with Beehaw and sh.itjust.works or whatever. (I take for granted that moderation will suck ass because gestures vaguely at Facebook.)
  That's a good enough reason for me. I also think federating with Meta is a bad idea on principle and out of self-interest, since they will extinguish the fediverse at the first possible opportunity and federating with them gives them the chance to draw in users and later wall them off.

Push celebrities, influencers, and businesses to create their own instances, outside of Meta.
If they just use a Threads account, then the Fediverse gets made irrelevant. Along come the Three E's, and Meta walls up the garden and starts putting billboards up everywhere.
Celebrities, influencers, & businesses need to know that they can now have a social media presence that they own, rather than rent, where they can make the rules for the communities they host. It's good for them in that it keeps their Fediverse presence theirs, they get to call the shots and choose how their instance is set up.
Because if enough people have a strong Fediverse presence outside of Threads land, it'll make it much harder for Meta to pull the plug.
- I'm doing my part here by promoting "Barbie", only in theaters July 21st.
  This is my instance now.
  
  "I'm a Barbie girl, and this is MY Barbie world."
- Could we get John Oliver on board with the fediverse?

In my opinion, the people that use Instagram and will potentially use Threads aren't the ones who will get into the Fediverse.
They will probably not even know that this exists in the app as it just puts you directly in threads.net.
Also, there's the option that this is just a 'trend thing' that will die in a week or two, probably because people won't get used to or due to legal problems (as it's already happening).
Edit: typo.
- I dropped Instagram for Pixelfed a week or two ago. It's a small community, but friendly and nobody is trying to sell me anything lol.
- Same could be said about fediverse in general. I thought there would be more action against reddit but seems the majority of people don't care.
- I use instagram on the daily (mostly lurking). It's very good for inspiration and updates in my hobby, which is a small community basically only on instagram. Due to how it all works and is set up its fairly impossible to move it elsewhere (for the time being).
  I do like it here though, this is nice. Not gonna mess with threads at all, that's for sure.

I'm going to block it as a user until I find a friendly, stable instance of my favoured Fediverse flavours that blocks it for me.
There's no persuasive argument I've heard for treating Meta as anything other than a rampaging horde of Huns on the attack.
- I'm brand new to Lemmy (guess why, lol) and federated systems in general. How do I block all things Meta? And what does that even mean for Lemmy, where it's an entirely different site from Facebook?
  
  As of now, there's no built-in means to block entire instances as a user. The only way to keep them out are to use an instance that is 2 levels separated from them, that is an instance that doesn't federate with another instance that federates with them.

I was recently asked by my employer if we should move our social media efforts to fediverse and my recommendation was that this community it's both too small and also would be hostile (rightly) to corporate empty posting.
As soon as threads has a web interface that's usable I will be starting up there...
You put your recycling in the blue can, compost in the green can and your corporate garbage on Meta.
- The whole idea is they should setup their own instance, and try and encourage a community there.
  Governments should also setup their own lemmy/mastadon instances as well, use it for PR/interaction.
  
  I think we got to a point in corporate comms where everyone decided we have to post at a regular interval, even when there's nothing interesting happening.
  This feela like a good time to revaluate what we do on social. I have thought about standing up an instance, but realistically we have our internal Teams that employees use... So they wouldn't use it, and I can't imagine myself subscribing to a bunch of company instances, so it seems like it's an effort for nobody.
  That said we often put on community events like hackathons. I think situations like that are perfect for posting on our cyber security servers.
  Less white noise trash is better.

I'm going to recommend that if W3C starts accepting changes to the AP standard from Meta, the community must maintain a fork that rips out any offending parts.
- The part that most concerns me is that meta is going to be able to use it's considerable influence to fuck with AP. Although, at this point I'm 50/50 on whether they even bother with federation.
  
  The W3C has shown in the past that it can't be trusted not to take bribes. See alse: EME

I think defederating is the only way forward, Facebook will take over otherwise even if they do it slowly.
- No offense but I think the website becomes useless if it's defederated.
  
  Only with Threads

Aren't the privacy concerns about threads so bad they can't release it in Europe?
If you give meta a crack in the door of the fediverse it's going to do all it can to consume it entirely. Allow meta in at the peril of federated social media.
- privacy concerns around their app, it's a nightmare. never install it. but they can't get any data from the protocol that you aren't already publishing, and they can already get that without starting a different service.
- EU blocked the app yes, because it gathers a lot of data from the user of the app.
  Not the website/service in general though.

I want nothing to do with meta or facebook.
If this gets serious I'm out of here as fast as I dumped reddit.
~tildes it is.

There's really no imminent threat with Meta and ActivityPub, as a standard.
As for Threads and Mastodon, the "threat" is mild. If Meta wants your data, they can get it without spinning up an entire social network. If the concern is that it's going to lower the quality of the content, well, there's probably some truth to that, but that would happen with popularity, regardless of which service became popular, and it's a problem solved by the block function.
- data is not a problem, you should accept what you post publicly to be well... public
  what most people are worried about is embrace extend and extinguish policy, if you haven't read it already here it is
  
  Everyone on the fediverse knows about EEE at this point; it's mentioned in every other post haha
  The dev behind Mastodon doesn't seem concerned. Why are you?

I will leave and block any instance that federates with Meta, including this one, and go start my own instance, and only federate with others that also block it if I have to. Don't you dare allow their corporate garbage into our space 😠

Drop that trash

Make an account and use chatgpt to shit post on it.
- Ah, the u/spez r/programming approach. A classic.

I feel like the EEE attack is inevitable at this point.
Why else would they even be willing to federate?
They saw the threat that decentralized non-profit social media is and want to kill it before it has a chance.
All Lemmy servers and especially the largest ones need to defederate from it immediately.
- They're "willing to federate" as an end-run around certain antitrust laws in the EU. By supporting ActivityPub, Meta has plausible deniability in claiming they're not a monopoly, despite being a de-facto monopoly being their final goal.

As the fediverse grows, there will inevitably be more centralized instances. Every big tech corp may want to start their own instance, similar to how most tech corps provide their own mail services.
There are millions of email service providers, but Gmail and Outlook are synonymous to email for a large amount of people.
Defederating with Meta and Tumblr is like Protonmail blocking every mail from Gmail. You just cripple yourself and make your instance useless.
- Every user on threads has something in common. They were stupid enough to join threads.
  I'm depriving myself of nothing by defederating that mess.
  
  Threads is a Twitter competitor. Same applies to Mastodon.
  Twitter is only useful because companies, celebrities amd politicians embrace it. Nobody cares about ordinary Twitter users. Twitter is a platform for networking with people in the industry and announcing stuff to customers.
  Mastodon right now is not an alternative to Twitter, because there is practically nobody important there.
  Threads has better chances to overcome this and has already in a few hours pulled more VIPs onto their platform, than Mastodon in multiple years.
  
  Come on what is this elitism, almost everyone has an Instagram, it's not that huge of a leap to just press the button that says threats, it's not a sign of stupidity.
  Seriously there is some heavy gatekeeping and elitism going around whenever there is a conversation around META
- You make it sound like listening to the type of person who uses Threads is useful. Weird.

Threads doesn't need to do an EEE attack. They've already gained many more users than the entire Fediverse. At this point, I wouldn't be surprised if they decided to not join the Fediverse at all.
I would never use Threads, but I would use a Mastodon instance that federated with Threads. I already see many journalists and content creators I like trying it out, who either stopped using Mastadon long ago or never even tried it in the first place. If Threads started doing things that negatively affected my experience, I would then switch to a Mastodon instance that wasn't federated with Threads.

I have already blocked threads on my household instance. I decided that I don't want to have to trust major instance admins to take the same things seriously that I do.

we shouldn't do anything.
Isn't the whole promise of the fediverse that whatever the policies of one instance are, that doesn't necessarily affect all the other instances, and each can do their own thing. If an instance doesn't want to accept traffic from threads, good for them. But to try to organize a fediverse-wide response to threads seems a whole lot like the centralization the fediverse is supposed to not be.
- Well the resistance isn't without reason:
  https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
- Agree, by design the fediverse should be able to resist whatever the supposed harm is from META, I don't really agree with privacy concerns since everything on the fediverse is public, especially on kbin and lemmy, almost everything is already available to whomever eants it, there is no need to set up this hugr machination since they can already accomplish it so much easier.
- I'd like to add to this that there's no particular benefit to defederating preemptively instead of defederating in response to a problem.
  Also, is this a problem we need to deal with? I think it matters for Mastodon instances, but I don't think Threads users will be interacting with Lemmy.

I run my own instance and am defederating immediately (whenever they start federating). I did also join the pact.
I'll evaluate their impact a month or so in and decide whether or not to refederate.
I acknowledge there's potential for a positive impact here, so I will give them a chance.

Another vote to defederate here.

In my opinion, nothing. If Meta is able to effectively take over Fediverse as people are claiming, then the Fediverse was never destined to survive to begin with. On to the next thing. This is the first real test of the resilience of this type of “decentralized social network”, and if it ends up going to shit, it would have eventually anyway.
- I disagree with this. You're saying we should watch Meta invade and profit off the fediverse and do nothing? Just because it's an open standard doesn't mean we should watch and let it happen, defederating is retaliation. The fediverse isn't going to succeed by people doing nothing and watching others ruin it.
  We've seen this happen. Many times. If the fediverse admins are going to repeat the mistakes of other standards then it's going to slowly get worse until people do another standard and do it all over again.
  
  What I’m saying is that if there’s always this constant corporate threat, if there’s the functional possibility of it happening, then it will eventually happen. If not Meta, then Musk, or god forbid Trump. Having to constantly “defend” against a mega instance does not seem like a sustainable future for the platform. That said I don’t think this is even an issue. There will always be instances that fundamentally don’t and won’t federate with Threads and other potential big players, so just go there. That’s kinda the point of this whole thing isn’t it? Activitypub and Lemmy/Mastodon won’t go away just because most people are somewhere else.
  
  What can we do as user though? Other than whining which make instance admins and moderators job more difficult, we can only do very few things to stop meta. Fediverse is free, it is better for us users quietly migrate away from instance that don't align with our value (in both ways) than harrasing instance admins. At worst it will make admins rage-quit then all of sudden your (or our) instance is gone like that mastodon.online...

Given that everything right now is just speculation - I say sit tight, observe what actually happens and respond appropriately if it does start to go wrong. Defederation is very easy, we can do it when we need to
- yeah people are already saying the fediverse is dead... it's just stupid to concede that easily. Just block the corporations and if they end up with more content and more users, just... ignore them? its's not conplicated

Threads is exactly showing the biggest problem with anything Fediverse. It's simpler for the user so it will be accepted. The amount of people I've already seen join is huge compared to mastodon.
- Lemmy doesn't need to be #1 in popularity. I'd prefer it to split and maintain a higher level of quality, even if it's smaller as a result. Even if Meta can grab data either way, it should be disconnected on principle.
  
  Yup, my main concern is being fed stuff Meta wants us to see so they can misinform and manipulate public opinion. I want to never interact with Meta again.

Fuck em. Burn this place to the ground before we dance with the devil.

Here's Eugen Rotchko's thoughts.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/
- What an excellent article. Informative and to the point.
  Recommend everyone read it.

threads will never federate.

I think defederation isn't the solution. Am I dumb in thinking this could actual have a mutual benefit?
Just an example: I will never use Threads, but if I can communicate with them from my Mastodon account, I would like to have that option.
- Many who don't see the danger were not here in the 2000's. There are so many great technical achievements that were killed by microsoft, google or facebook EEE'ing the shit out of it. Remember jabber/xmpp? Yeah, both FB and Google implemented the protocol in their chat apps. Everyone was thrilled; I could use my jabber client to connext to fb and talk to my friends. Then they remembered there's not any money in that and killed the projects.
  Even if it's good for the fediverse now, as soon as they realize they can make more money by not having to sync with other companies and organizations, they'll be out of here, leaving nothing behind like a swarm of locusts. The only defense is defederation.
  
  XMPP was extremely niche before Google and it is slightly less niche right now. It did not die.
  You can not destroy the fediverse with EEE in my opinion.
- if I can communicate with them from my Mastodon account, I would like to have that option.
  That's the Embrace part, and it is mutually beneficial. Later on, Threads may give your Mastodon account a special color to mark you as one of the crazy socialists, and let their own users exchange unique awards, super-boosts, or other neat Extended features. Then connection between Threads and Mastodon-at-large becomes unreliable due to technical differences in protocol or just volume of content. Threads users see a handful of their friends drop off for no apparent reason, but 'classic' Mastodon users lose almost everyone and the platform is effectively Extinguished.
  
  This strategy works so well it's scary. Though sometimes the open protocol ends up winning... Spotify has been trying to kill podcasts for ages, but they're not winning even by dumping money into exclusive content.
  
  So you'd end up .. exactly where we are now?
- I wouldn't call you dumb, but naive yeah. I don't trust anything facebook does and them trying to get involved here is just another shot at unethical data collection. The content on all their sites is shit and sinpleminded so imo nothing they do should be welcome here.

What’s the DNS I need to block to never inadvertently get sent to anything Threads related?
- You can block Meta at the AS level for your instance firewall, and also at federation level so that you can defederate from second order offenders.

Same thing we do about reddit. They are free to do their own thing in their own corner as long as they don't bring us into it.

Don't use it.

I say we should just let Threads fail through its own doing.

There needs to be a Mozilla-like foundation that builds a competitive product platform for Fediverse that looks slick, is free of bugs, and matches any additional features that Threads might come up with
- Wikipedia had that insanely named Wikitribune that has now turned into Trust Cafe which is a better name with an awful site name. https://wts2.wt.social/en/auth
  Link talking about it at Reddit
  
  The Wikipedia foundation could be a good player in the fediverse, but they don't seem too proactive in integrating with us right now.

"Should 'we' do?"
Nothing. If people and/or communities coming in through Threads are engaging in good faith, cool, more nice folks to have a community with. People/communities engaging in bad faith get blocked/defederated as is already common practice (and seems to be working outstandingly already, looking at average quality of posts and discourse "here" as compared to the "big platforms").
When Meta/Threads is hosting communities I like to see/be a part of, I'll figure out how to subscribe/integrate those. Besides that, they're free and welcome to run echo chambers in their own instances and communities, I don't see how any of that would ever show up on my feed.
- Threads is Meta. By definition they are not engaging in good faith. Good faith is not a Meta value.
  
  Is it (more) about Meta themselves, or rather about individual users, though?

I am kinda curious to see how federating with it would actually work. I.e. what kind of content would actually end up in my "All" view, the usual facebook trash or actually interesting stuff? And would there maybe be interesting communities on it?
- There would be interesting communities for sure, but your All feed would quickly turn into a Threads feed.

Can Lemmy.world go read-only? I think the biggest threat that can actually be handled is a bunch of shitty Facebook users making shitty, angry comments in lemmy.world threads. letting Threads read and display Lemmy.world content, but not comment would solve this.
There are other important threats from Facebook, but this one can actually be solved.

Read this: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/07/what-to-know-about-threads/

In order to compete in user experience we need to up our game. We need to set up communities which collect, categorize and funnel user requests upstream. These features should be focused on:
reducing frictions like unclear UI, broken links, etc.
improving usability of the various web frontends (the one from Lemmy, kbin, etc.)
collecting bug reports and making sure they will be fixed
This is meant to be a proxy between average users and tech enthusiasts who know how to do pull requests or open GitHub issues. Moderators of these communities would do it for them. This would enable us to gain visibility in the needs of the users.
This is only a part of what needs to be done, but I think this can be done quickly.
- Lemmy doesn't need to compete. Hell, it can't compete. It's an open-source platform developed basically as volunteer work. Meta (and Threads) has millions of dollars and massive teams behind it.
  Thankfully, we don't need Meta. We just need to do what we can to resist. The best we can hope for and what we should aim for is to limit the impact/damage Threads will have on our segment of the Fed. How to do that, I'm not sure exactly, but my first instinct is to block off anything corporate. Any interaction at all is basically just asking monied interests to take over.

Don't worry. Elon's gonna sue and Zuck will quietly shut Threads down. /s
I've been reading blog posts taking various positions and remain undecided.

Threats is a better name for that data collecting pos.

I'm somewhat undecided here, because ultimately I don't care for federated services to become dominant at all costs, nor do I care if they shrink slightly. I want the users of these services to voluntarily choose them based on the principles that federated social media stands for right now. My personal opinion right now is let them federate, but defederate the minute the "extend" starts. But we'll see.

Here is how to block threads on Mastodon, if anyone has any ideas for how to do it on Lemmy, that'd be great.
https://hachyderm.io/@crowgirl/110663465238573628
- Right now? Have a Lemmy account on an instance that defederates anything Threads.
  
  Is there a list of these somewhere?

@SDF@lemmy.sdf.org Would love to know from you, what do you plan to do?
What is the SDF's current attitude to Threads?

What worries me most is how this has shown me how how wildly insecurely ActivityPub seems to be storing and sharing user data.

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