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:
No, it’s far more malevolent.
Have you explored any of the research on the neurochemistry of social media? It’s too early to have a strong foundation, but what’s there isn’t good. Facebook is absolutely designing their algorithm to change your brain chemistry to suit their purposes, which means lots of toxicity so they can feed your “engagement” to advertisers. It absolutely physically changes your brain, and it’s not for the better.
It’s not about the people. It’s about whether you can trust their servers talking to yours. It’s about how much of the community they can split out into terrible “Facebook compatible” servers that they can bully their way into controlling.
There’s no path to federating with anything Facebook owns not being a catastrophe.