We need to think this through from the standpoint of an instance admin who is trying to figure out how to use Threads to make their instance grow. That’s really the only motivation I can think of to federate with Threads. Otherwise it’s just all downside. As a corporate social media entity, they are entirely opposed to everything Lemmy stands for philosophically, and their scale is a massive threat to the culture and operations of the much smaller fediverse. Why would anyone ever want to federate with them? Because they see it as an opportunity. To ride the dragon, thinking it can be controlled. This is madness. Choice 4 all the way and if it becomes necessary, 5.

I'm starting to dislike the concept of ActivityPub. It gives power to the admins instead of to the users. Users should be able to decide what servers they connect to and what content they see. I hope another protocol like Nostr becomes more popular.

They already got millions of users. Depending how they'll implement federation, the sudden influx of millions of unmoderated users into the fediverse might wreak havoc to small instances. So personally, I prefer no. 3, defederate (wait and see).

So why is it important to not federate (or block) with Thread? Asking seriously. I read the article and while those are valid and real concerns. What is the net gain of that action? How does it help the fediverse? I cant see any way that it helps and lots of ways it hurts. At this point it seems like a lot of what ifs.

Edit:

If you need the reasons why to block Threads (meta) I think the answers below explain it better than most!

Everyone is talking about defederating preemptively because of XMPP and EEE. But the very fact that we know about EEE means that it's much less likely to succeed.

Zuck is seeing the metaverse crash and burn and he knows he needs to create the next hot new thing before even the boomers left on facebook get bored with it. Twitter crashing and burning is a perfect business opportunity, but he can't just copy Twitter - it has to be "Twitter, but better". So, doing what any exec does, he looks for buzzwords and trends to make his new product more exciting. Hence the fediverse.

From Meta's standpoint, they don't need the Fediverse. Meta operates at a vastly different scale. Mastodon took 7 years to reach ~10M users - Threads did that in a day or two. My guess is that Zuck is riding on the Fediverse buzzword. I'm sure whatever integration he builds in future will be limited.

TL;DR below:

I frankly prefer options 4-5. There’s no evidence that Facebook will play nice and a lot of historical evidence that they won’t. I want to be on an instance willing to take the nuclear option if it comes to it.

Only real threats of Threads federation are EEE and server overload. Not the people from there or privacy. If someone wants to see some content you don't want to see, like some opinion you don't like, they should be able to see it. I don't understand why there would be such list, it would be pure censorship and waste of time. I have heard Threads has a pretty good moderation, so that solves this problem anyway.

I don't get what would defederating with Facebook-federated instances gives you, though.

4 is honestly my preference. I don’t see the need to defederate from instances that federate with Threads. But I do want to see a list of instances that federate with Threads so I can personally never comment or post there. I don’t like the idea of comments and posts I make being used to generate ad revenue for Facebook.

6. Make your own instance, defederate from everyone, make 20 accounts, disable account registration, post from 2 or 3 accounts, upvote from the rest and make conversations.

/j on the 5... cuz it's a bit extreme.

Choice 2. 5 is ridiculous and more harmful to the fediverse than the worst case of EEE.

From what I gather, EEE only works if:

1. Fediverse users mass exodus to Threads
2. Meta extends ActivityPub Standard so much that other FOSS projects couldn't keep up.

I feel like defederating would not solve 1. If 2 happens, the fediverse would just defederate anyway.

(Ofc we have to think about the privacy risks of federations etc.

If 9 regular people sit down with a nazi without protest, you have 10 nazis. Threads will absolutely not stop nazis from posting nazi stuff. We know this because Facebook is full of nazis. Why would anyone want nazis at their table? Because they’re nazis. Anyone who wants to federate with Threads is a nazi. Do you want to federate with nazis? Option 5 is really the only way to keep the nazis away from the table. This is not an exaggeration. There are literal nazis given free reign on Facebook. There will be literal nazis given free reign on Threads. If you don’t stop the nazis because you want to interact with your friends who interact with nazis, you’re enabling nazis. Don’t enable nazis. I can’t stress enough they are literally nazis.

I hate to say it but we already need a better Twitter and Reddit alternative than what the fediverse has to offer, then. Each time a big company comes in, the communities will get thrown into disarray, eat eachother, and generally make the original 'vision' of the fediverse smaller and smaller. People will use what is easy, not what is best for their interests (at least for the vast majority). The solution is still open source, community managed and driven content, but it doesn't look like the fediverse is a long-term answer.

5 is an absolutely horrible idea.

1 and 2 are best