The fediverse is discussing if we should defederate from Meta’s new Threads app. Here’s why I probably won’t (for now).

(Federation between plume and my lemmy instance doesn’t work correctly at the moment, otherwise I would have made this a proper crosspost)

  • TiffyBelle@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    This is a good take, imo.

    I never understood the privacy concerns. Well, I do insofar as it’s safe to assume Meta is privacy-hostile. But many seem to think using Mastodon/Lemmy/etc. are some how “private” corners of the internet when they’re anything but. It is very trivial for someone to access public data on fediverse sites as you’ve pointed out, and if they want that data they’re going to get it.

    The beauty of the fediverse is that we can choose who we trust with our core data, such as sign-up details, IP addresses, etc. Signing up to the Threads instance/app would be a disaster from a privacy perspective, but just treating them like any other server and taking advantage of the increased engagement from the content their large instance will post will likely increase content available on the fediverse and engagement across the board. Any decision to defederate with their instance(s) should purely be based on content and nothing more, imo. From a cross-server perspective, they’re no different than any other large instance.