Those of you not plugged into the Mastodon community may not be aware of the predominant reaction to Instagram Threads. This started when it was merely rumored, reaching a crescendo with reports that Meta had been talking to a few of the larger Mastodon instances under NDA, presumably to encourage them not to “defederate” with Threads when it came online.1 Let me describe that reaction for you, with only mild exaggeration:
The article fails to go over the scenario of fediverse instances falling in line with whatever moderation rules facebook enforces in fear of getting defederated. That is a natural reaction that is really difficult to overcome.
Why would that happen? The majority of instance admins have already said they’ll defederate with Threads. I doubt there are large number of instance who actively want to not only federate with Threads, but want to federate so bad that they’ll change their own moderation practices against their users’ wishes.
Because people suck.
And I’m not talking about defederated instances. Those have made a stance. It’s great we seem to be at the majority here, but new instances will pop up overtime, user counts will shift, policies will change.
I’m kinda baffled at how little trust people have on the Fediverse. People talk like every single instance is one soft breeze from collapsing and giving into the first Big Tech company to glance their way, and they best that we can hope is to fence it off to ward off the inevitable temptation. If that’s how it is, it doesn’t bode well for the future, regardless of Meta’s presence.
The Fediverse is fragile. Especially Lemmy. Any more of yesterday’s XSS shenanigans (welcome back to 2010!) and Lemmy will get the reputation of impossible to trust. Similar to how Google+ was a “ghosttown” with a few hundred million users, a few million of which were actually active.