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"I also understand how that could be seen to go against the point of federated social media in the first place…"

Federating with Meta is different from federating with individuals. It's like letting corporations be treated the same as natural persons for the purposes of voting in political elections and exercising other civic participation rights.

Natural persons may have a variety of motivations for federating. Corporations have only one: to increase profit.

And please don't say "federate now, revisit later if needed." Recall the fable about the scorpion and the rabbit facing a raging flood. Said the scorpion, "oh please, rabbit, let me ride on your back as you swim across." Rabbit said "no, you'll sting me and I'll die." Scorpion said "no I won't; we're both in danger; I have children at home; we both want to live." Rabbit said "okay, if you promise not to sting me." So scorpion climbed onto rabbit's back, and halfway across the flood, scorpion gave rabbit a lethal sting. Rabbit asked why, and scorpion shrugged; "you knew what I was when you let me onto your back."

I'm wondering if it really matters? I don't know how exactly defederation looks from other side but I imagine that a company like meta can easily run a stealth "proxy" instance that isn't advertised as being owned by them and use that to siphon content and present it to their users. It really wouldnt matter if the rest of the fediverse see the commends from threads users because more than likely threads users will outnumber the entire fediverse within a month and can happily exist within that walled garden.

Sadly as much as I agree with the sentiment, I don't think federating will have much effect at all.

Companies invading the fediverse was always going to happen, it's not necessarily a bad thing. You get more users, a rock solid instance, possibly more support in coding, and maybe more. There's no reason to have bots essentially copying content from a place that offers federation

There's also definite downsides, federating could be expensive for smaller instances to handle all that content, potential pressure for more tracking/less porn/more ad friendly code built into the system, making communities better through proprietary extensions to slowly cannibalize the rest of the instances.

Blanket decisions to block corporate instances is probably a bad move, though keeping a short leash is wise.

Can Meta scrape the data off other apps like mastodon from federated communities? I don't exactly know how that works. I'm assuming mastodon and other not profit based apps don't track any data so how would meta joining the fediverse change it?

I think it's all but given that meta would have the largest number of users using its apps in the fediverse. Threads already has 2 million sign-ups in hours so it would be a miss to just defederate from it and lock down millions of users from interacting with meta users. Let's see how it goes.

Edit: 5 million sign-ups in 4 hours according to zuck

If they cannot collect my personal info any more than any other Lemmy or KBin instance can, then honestly I don’t care. If they want to make it interoperable, ok good, I’m sure somebody will be happy. I will not be signing up for an account, and if I don’t go out looking for the content I may not ever even see it.

I don't have any firm opinions yet. I definitely feel the knee-jerk temptation to not federate with them, but on the other hand I guess federated Facebook products is pretty much what I want from them.

I don't care about Threads very much (at least yet), but I know a lot of people where my only way to get in contact with them is Facebook Messenger. So if I could contact them without needing to have a facebook account myself, I'd be quite happy.

Facebook (meta) is going to try to buy market share into something that isn't monetizable. I don't see the point in defederating from them because they will just do it again and again secretly until one of their instances has some success. All you are really doing by defederating from them is setting up future scenarios where instances will start accusing each other of being meta shills, which would mostly just ruin the fediverse if everyone defederates from everyone. The existential threat to the fediverse is the fediverse itself. These companies are competing for eyeballs, and killing the fediverse would drive users to other monetized platforms. Sure you can defederate from the instances they admit they are running, but they and every other social media company are probably here already or will be soon. I wouldn't worry about it. Just keep meming and kicking out the Nazis.