Having thought more about this issue over the past couple of weeks, and having read some of the arguments of others (Erin Kissane's persuasive blog post in particular), I have reconsidered my position on this and cannot in good conscience allow this instance to federate with Threads or any other Meta entity. Defederation is effective immediately.
this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2023
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I just joined but I'm so glad to see this! Glad to be here and excited to become part of the community!
Nice, that's really good to hear! I read that post too and found it quite compelling. Ty for the update and, well, happy new year!!
Yeah, the Kissane post is pretty damning. I've been waffling between my original anti-Meta stance and maybe waiting for them to misstep, but she fully convinced me that they've already shown us who they are.
Thank you for this decision, I think it's the wisest choice.
Hoping that we do defederate!
Honestly, me too. The fediverse has some shared values baked in that are incompatible with Meta's info-harvesting MO.
EDIT: The below information is no longer current. See the updated comment.
The current Defederation Policy is outlined here, and Threads doesn't meet the criteria for defederation at this time. However, I want to be clear that I am no way a fan of Meta, their business model or their practices. I am sympathetic to many of the arguments for pre-emptive defederation and believe it will require further consideration going forward. I am open to putting defederation to a vote in the future.
My feeling is that we take a watch-and-act approach and see how things pan out after federation. There are a few reasons for this:
- I believe that most people use Lemmy as a curated platform for consuming content, i.e. using the Subscribed feed rather than All feed, so the potential for a popular platform like Threads to dominate users' feeds may not be as big a problem as some think. This is further ameliorated by point 2.
- The latest version of Lemmy, 0.19, has just been released (coming soon to LS) and allows users to block entire instances from their feed. This isn't a silver bullet as it still allows comments from blocked instances, but it's a significant step in the right direction.
- Lemmy is public so there's not a lot of additional data Meta will gain access to once federated. Yes, they will see things like who votes on what and how, but they could already access this data by others means if they wanted it (like simply creating a Lemmy instance).
- We can defederate at any time in the future.
Ty for the update! I do think that meta has enough going on in threads for it to fail our ToS (e.g. unmoderated alt-right content) so I am not in full agreement of the "wait and see" approach; and additionally, as you mention, user level blocking doesn't exactly do much for the data harvesting processes they're infamous for. So I'd rather the preemptive block. But I am ok with a wait and see approach as long as we're able to act fast as soon as they inevitably do another war crime or whatever 😅
On mastodon a lot of instances that have chosen to wait and see have found that there's enough on threads to started defederating; example here.