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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Fediverse
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This magazine is dedicated to discussions on the federated social networking ecosystem, which includes decentralized and open-source social media platforms. Whether you are a user, developer, or simply interested in the concept of decentralized social media, this is the place for you. Here you can share your knowledge, ask questions, and engage in discussions on topics such as the benefits and challenges of decentralized social media, new and existing federated platforms, and more. From the latest developments and trends to ethical considerations and the future of federated social media, this category covers a wide range of topics related to the Fediverse.
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I'm afraid we will lose if we accept them until they do something bad. Given their track record, that's just a matter of time. If we let them become important to the fediverse as long as they play nice, the final decision could be disastrous for the fediverse when they stop playing nice.
So the right thing to say seems for me: "No, this is our house. We don’t federate with you."
That is a completely valid take here. My partner who runs our Mastodon instance will be preemptively defederating with Threads (on my suggestion), so I do agree with you, but I realize not everyone in the Fediverse may share that take - it's a weighted scale where one end is "mass adoption of a Web 3.0 decentralized Fediverse" and the other end is "but adoption in which most people are on Threads will be centralization anyway, so we will have already failed."
I think in any case it may not matter, as I believe Meta / Threads will only federate with instances that agree to follow their moderation standards - after all, Meta likely doesn't want porn and Nazis federated to their communities because then they can't run advertisements. As a Fediverse community, we're pretty good at taking care of the Nazi thing, but Mastodon's got an awful lot of porn on it.
It will really depend on which admins take that deal to be beholden to Meta's standards, potentially opening themselves up not only to huge moderation concerns but to a future requirement of taking advertisements. I hope large instances will not. I would prefer to see the Fediverse operate separate from Threads, who will be using the ActivityPub protocol but not part of the larger Fediverse. Similar to how the conservative "truth.social" uses the Mastodon application and ActivityPub but is not part of the Fediverse because it is closed off.
A little off topic, but I was very surprised Reddit didn't pursue a similar approach of "we will lower greatly the costs of API but we will serve advertisements in the API as regular posts, so you must display them and can't strip them out."