With Meta beginning to test federation, there's a lot of discussion as to whether we should preemptively defederate with Threads. I made a post about the question, and it seems that opinions differ a lot among people on Kbin. There were a lot of arguments for and against regarding ads, privacy, and content quality, but I don't think those are the main issues. Imo, Threads presents a serious danger to the long-term viability of the fediverse if we become dependent on it for content, and our best bet at avoiding that is defederation.
Let's start with these three statements, which should hopefully seem pretty reasonable:
- It's dangerous for one entity to dominate the activity pool. If, say, one person's instance contributes 95% of the content, then the rest of the fediverse becomes dependent on that instance. Should that instance defederate, everyone else will have to either live with 1/20 of the content or move to that instance, and good luck getting the fediverse to grow after that. By making everyone dependent on their instance for content, that one person gains the power to kill the fediverse by defederating.
- Profit-driven media should not be the primary way people interact with the fediverse. Open source, non-corporate instances should be able to grow, and that growth will be stunted if most people who want to interact with the fediverse are deciding to go to corporate, profit-driven instances. Furthermore, lots of people went to the fediverse to avoid the influence of these large corporations on social media, and it should still uphold this purpose.
- People should enter the fediverse with an idea of its purpose. If someone's on the fediverse, they should be aware of that fact and aware of the fediverse's goal of decentralized media. People should think of the fediverse as every instance contributing to a decentralized pool of content, not other instances tapping in to their instance as the main pool.
Now, let's apply these to federating with Threads:
- This point alone is more than enough reason to defederate from Threads. Threads has millions more active users than all of the fediverse combined, and it's in much better of a position to grow its userbase due to its integration with Instagram. If we federate with Threads, it will dominate content. And that's not mentioning all of the company accounts on Threads that people have expressed an interest in following. While all of this new activity may seem like a good thing, it puts everyone in a position of dependence on Threads. People are going to get used to the massive increase in content from Threads, and if it ever defederates, tons of people on other instances are going to leave with it. Essentially, Zuckerberg will eventually be able to kill the fediverse's growth prospects when he wishes and nab a bunch of users in the process, both of which he has incentive to do.
- If we federate with Threads, Threads is undoubtedly going to seem like the easiest way to access our pool of content (at least on the microblog side of things). Newcomers already get intimidated by having to choose a Mastodon instance; give them access via essentially just logging into their Instagram account, and they'll take that over the non-corporate alternatives. Federation with Threads means that most of the people who want to see the content we make are going to go to Threads, meaning platforms like Mastodon & Kbin will be less able to grow.
- When people go to Mastodon, Kbin, Lemmy, Firefish, Misskey, etc., they do so knowing they're going to the fediverse. When people go to Threads, most do so because they have an Instagram account. I'd bet that when Threads gets federation up and running, most people on Threads won't have a clue that they're on the fediverse. Those who do know will probably think of it as all of these small, niche platforms that are kinda offshoots of Threads. That's not the mentality that should pervade the fediverse.
I think that all of this is makes defederating from Threads a no-brainer. If we don't, we'll depend on Meta for activity, platforms that aren't Threads won't grow, and the fediverse will be primarily composed of people who don't have even a vague idea of the purpose behind it. I want more activity as much as the next guy, but that activity being beholden to the corporations most of us want to avoid seems like the worst-case scenario.
"But why not defederate later?"
If we don't defederate now, I don't think we're ever going to defederate. Once the fediverse becomes dependent on Threads for most of its content, there's no going back. If anything, it'd get worse as Threads outpaces the rest of the fediverse in growth and thus makes up a larger and larger share of activity. Look at how desperate everyone is for activity — even if it means the fediverse being carried by Meta — right now, when we're not used to it. Trying to get instances to defederate later will be nigh impossible.
"Why not just block Threads yourself?"
Even if that were a feature, it completely ignores the problem. I don't dislike the people on Threads, and I don't think their content will necessarily be horrendous. The threat is people on non-corporate fediverse platforms becoming dependent on Daddy Zuck for content, and that's something that can only be fought with defederation.
To close, imagine if Steve Huffman said that Reddit was going to implement ActivityPub and federate with Lemmy & Kbin. Would you want the fediverse to be dependent on Reddit for activity? Would you trust Huffman, who has all the incentive in the world to pull the plug on federation once everyone on Lemmy & Kbin is hooked to Reddit content? This is the situation we're in, just with a different untrustworthy corporation. The fediverse should not be at the mercy of Threads, Reddit, The Site Formerly Known as Twitter, or any other corporate platform. It's better to grow slowly but surely than to put what we have in the hands of these people.
I would like to make a few counterpoints to yours from the opposite perspective.
To your first point: Nearly everyone here came from Reddit's API fiasco. We all already left the place that housed the vast majority of the content and went somewhere much slower and quieter. If Threads were to abandon ActivityPub in the future, we would still have the same users who are here now, and if returning the fediverse to it's current level of activity is to be considered a death sentence for it, wouldn't that mean we're already doomed? Things are stable right now though and we have enough activity to sustain a social network as is, so the loss of Threads content wouldn't be our downfall unless a majority of our current users decide its too quiet without them. However, I wouldn't expect the group who left all of Reddit's content behind to be the type who would also abandon their accounts here just because the Threads users aren't here again.
As for the second and third points, the beauty of ActivityPub is that it allows users to choose the services they want to use in order to access the same content across the fediverse, and it wouldn't be right for us to try to dictate how others choose to access an open protocol. If someone who is interested in joining the network decides to do so through Threads, that should be their choice to make, even though I personally think its the wrong one. In all likelihood though, someone making an account on Threads wouldn't have consciously joined the wider fediverse of their own volition anyway. Once they're on though and have a chance to maybe learn a little about these "third party services" they see, they'll make their way to these places instead. Exposure to the fediverse is the best way to understand it from my experience. There have also been a whole host of people who already signed up for Mastodon accounts without understanding a thing about what a federated network entails, they just wanted out of Twitter.
I don't think its right to view ActivityPub as competition to mainstream social media networks, it's a tool meant to help build a better unified social media network. If we limit who can use the tool, we'll only be hindering the growth of the fediverse.
Thanks for the alternate perspective! However, it doesn't really alleviate my concerns much:
Firstly, the claim "Nearly everyone here came from Reddit's API fiasco." isn't necessarily true, as the fediverse consists of more than Lemmy and the threads section on Kbin. Threads primarily concerns microblogging, which includes platforms like Mastodon, Misskey, Firefish, Friendica, and Kbin. Even so, you could say that all of these people came from similar situations — they all could've chose Twitter or what have you and instead chose the smaller platforms on the fediverse. But does that really mean that they'll stay here? This whole situation is showing that people are desperate for activity, even if that activity means relying on a corporation with interests that go against ours. People have already left following drops in activity — during Ernest's hiatus, the number of active Kbin users plummeted (yes, it was always going to down after the initial rise from the Reddit migration, but Kbin went down a lot, especially compared to Lemmy) and hasn't recovered. Those people, who have tried it and said, "Yeah, this isn't really working," are really hard to get back.
Now, imagine if everyone here got used to the large amount of microblog content provided by Threads, interacted with it a bunch, followed a bunch of Threads accounts, etc. like people are expressing plans to do. If Threads quits federating, thereby making all of that content and connection inaccessible to the rest of the fediverse, do you think people will stick around after that much of an activity drop? No, tons of people are going to follow the 99% of activity and flock to Threads, leaving the open fediverse in a position worse than right now. If you want to give Meta the chance to kill the fediverse's chance of growing to become a legitimate competitor, this is how you do it.
What you say about people having choice is true. If people want to access the fediverse through Threads, that is absolutely their choice. However, another beauty of ActivityPub is that we have the choice over whether we accept interaction with Threads or not. We don't have to become dependent on Meta to carry the fediverse — we can shut them out immediately and grow slowly but surely. If someone wants to join Threads, we aren't under any obligation to show them our content. Instead, saying, "Hey, if you want interaction with us, head over to something that cares about an open fediverse like a Mastodon or Kbin instance," is going to be much better for us long-term.