People criticizing Elon for banning links to Threads profiles while praising admins for defederating from Threads are hypocrites.
That's right, I don't see anything wrong with federating with Threads, at least for now. I believe doing so can help the fediverse go mainstream. Meta can't access personal data in other instances by design anyway.
It's quite alright to not want some huge corporation with a proven track record of being destructive in your free and open social network and still egg on the other billionaire asshole in his public feces throwing contest.
I think it's fair to have different standards for small, non-profit, community-driven, patreon-supported servers, and a behemoth with half a billion users.
The latter can literally change the course of history in a minute. The former can't.
I'll accept it's a hypocrisy if we can somehow have both these sides have the same kind of power.
That said, I don't care about Threads either way. Elon being petty about it is more funny than anything.
There's a difference between allowing speech about a thing and embracing the thing. This is a classic case of embrace, extend, extinguish.
If you're interested, I'd look into what happened with XMPP and Google talk. XMPP was a federated chat service. Google Talk became compatible with it, and instantly became the most popular client for it.
It then broke compatibility slowly, pushing more people from other XMPP clients onto Google talk.
They finally removed it completely, and because they were the most popular client, XMPP users moved to Google talk to maintain their connections to other users. The protocol basically ceased to exist.
People are broadly assuming that's Meta's plan with threads and Mastodon, because it's an extremely common way for corporations to get rid of open systems.
Fediverse is tribalistic like such communities often are.