I know that many people are concerned about “Threads” privacy policy and are all screaming “WE WILL BLOCK THREADS”. I honestly can’t see how it’s going to gather any personal information since Lemmy, mastodon etc. doesn’t collect any information at all. Like, how can you gather information about user, if he doesn’t have any information about himself. Sure, Threads will collect info about its users, that’s obvious, but I think it’s a bad idea to just block it from the start
On the flip side, if we federate freely with them the result is the same (and probably worse).
First of all, if you can access all federated resources (I think it’s more aimed at mastadon, and connections with the lemmy/kbin will be limited. But I’ve not looked at what threads is offering yet) then we’ve already seen what people as a whole do. Just check the flagship instances lemmy.world and kbin.social. People just flocked to the biggest servers. Well, now the biggest server will be threads.
But then the existing users. They will have friends saying “Oh you know, I signed up on threads it’s great” and they can say oh, well I’m already on mastadon and you can add me at me@here.social. And now they’re connected.
Since the majority of new users will be on threads, not most connections users have are on threads.
So, if and when it turns out Meta remove federation for whatever reason (there are so many they can choose from) the people still on mastadon instances (and maybe lemmy/kbin/etc to a lesser extent) most of their friends are gone. Now the fediverse people will stay. But normal users? They’ll sign up for threads and move on.
I’m not convinced there’s a winning route once they’re in. But, maybe I’m just the pessimist.
Neither am I. But universal pre-emptive defederation just cuts to the end game without any kind of fight. Meta users won’t even notice if/when they defederate because they never knew about us in the first place. And defederated instances will lose users to Meta because some people use social media in ways that only work well with bigger networks.
I’m all for some instances saying they want their networks to stay small and users who prefer it that way should have somewhere to go. But users who want a bigger network should have better options than signing up with Meta.
Kinda depressing because it’s only a matter of time before it happens with lemmy/kbin. Personally after the way reddit behaved after the API business, I was just happy I could go somewhere away from this corporate anti user atmosphere.
I mean, it’s plain obvious you can’t run a single service that can handle twitter or reddit levels of users without trying to get some money back. But you can have hundreds, or thousands of hobbyist size instances that spread this load. I think it’s a nice escape personally (looking at the traffic my instance gets, I do wonder how this would scale to real reddit numbers though).
But, the majority of people won’t think like that (and that’s not a criticism), they will go where the people are. Large companies with marketing budgets that are pre-established in social media will get the users.