In general I think everyone should be able to connect to any instance, as I'm a big advocate of a free and unregulated internet.

But as with many principles there are exceptions, and big data harvesting cooperation are my exception. The idea of the Fediverse is to have a decentralized, free (in both ways, does not cost and libre) and privacy respecting place in a world, where more and more governments and companies start to regulate and decide on what the users can do.

When I look back on the history of those companies I neither like nor trust them, and I think it would be not only a needed action but also a statement when instances defedrate them. We can not stop the data harvesting, as this can be done with simple web crawlers. But with gate keeping (and I do not like it when people do it, but here, I think it is necessary), we can maybe bring the Fediverse more into the public eye. Because when we allow the Threads instances to federate, most people will just see it as Threads. They will not understand what the Fediverse is and will not see it as a new way of using the internet. The same kind of happened with Android, most do not know it is Linux and just talk about Android. I think for Android it is not a big problem, but the Fediverse is a movement, a change and statement people are fighting for, and it shall be and stay that, not just another protocol that is used to transfer likes.

At the beginning of this instance, I once asked the admin and if I remember correctly, a defederation of such instances is not seen as an action to take. Maybe we need to mobilize in other communities on feddit.ch to raise our concern.

(Pinned your post, as I think this is an important discussion to have)

They are Facebook. Facebook has and will sell any and all data it can get.

I'm deeply conflicted about this, I want federation with big services, I think that is part of the raison d'etre of #activitypub.

But I know the risks, I'm old enough to remember #Microsoft embracing and extinguishing the browser, #Goggle defederating from #XMPP and #Facebook predatory tactics.

Also, I'm starting to think that federation with the big players is unstoppable. The protocol is open and there is no way to get every instance operator on board with the #fedipact . If people want to see the big players' content they'll move to an instance that federates with them. And defederating from those that connect to threads sounds like a Zealot's suicide pact.

Ideally we'd need some kind of legal protection, that makes big services accoutable for what they do with open protocols, but the best we can hope is that the threat of such legislation being enacted will scare the bigs ones into playing fair.

In the mean while there are no technical measures that I can think of and the social measures are unlikely to work. The only thing we can do is to enter into this with open eyes, aware of our history and hope for the best.

We shall defederate from Threads. Everybody has known of Facebook's willingness to scrape users' data, even those on the rest of the Fediverse, and have the same admin privileges as any human granted admin privileges.