Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a symbolic move, because we all hate Meta? Or is the idea to just maintain a barrier (albeit a porous one) between us and the part of the Internet inhabited by our chuddy relatives?
(For my part, I’m working on setting up my own Lemmy and/or Pixelfed instance(s) and I do not currently intend to defederate.)
Yep. On one hand, I’d be super-concerned if Reddit decided they were federating with Lemmy. Reddit would create /c’s on their instance for all of their /r’s and completely torpedo all of the existing Lemmy communities.
Mastodon is just users though. You don’t generally see users in your feed unless you actively follow them – or if you decide to drink from the firehose and go look at the All feed. And it’s not like Meta can “take over” Mastodon hashtags like Reddit could take over communities. Hashtags are server agnostic.
And unless you sign up on their server, I honestly don’t see how Meta can pilfer more data than they already can by just scraping public servers.
Just please don’t let Meta diddle the ActivityPub protocols. They need to adapt to the protocols. Nobody should be adapting the protocols to them.
It would still be nice to be able to use the All feed though, and not have it filled with giga-engagement posts from hundreds of millions of Threads users.
Even now, All/Federated is just way too overwhelming to be of much use.
Depending on how big your instance is, Local is still viable. And Meta won’t change your Local feed at all.