Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you’re a server admin, please defederate Meta’s domain “threads.net”
If you don’t run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate “threads.net”.
Meta is a known bad actor right up to the point of knowing they were facilitating a genocide and choosing not to do anything about it because “growth”.
“Yes, he’s murdered people before in cold blood, but maybe he won’t this time. There’s no excuse for banning John Wayne Gacy from the party!”
I’m well aware and deleted my Facebook long long ago.
And yet, despite “knowing” that Meta is a known bad actor, you’re fine with “wait and see” when John Wayne Gacy wants to come to the block party.
Yes, because they aren’t in control of the platform. We are. We can observe and decide, and they can’t stop us. The choice here isn’t “meta or not meta”, but rather “act based upon evidence or not” - meta and their handling of their own platforms where that had absolute control is not what we have here. This is a new situation. But here’s the thing, we will see the data, regardless. Some instances will choose to not defederate immediately, and we will still all benefit from the observation.
Meta has no control over elections but has had definitive negative impact on the same. Meta has no control over Myanmar’s government nor Buddhist institutions yet had had definitive negative impact (to the tune of tens of thousands of bodies and millions of displaced people) on that nation.
This one fact alone should give you pause about letting Meta stink up the fediverse: Threads’ userbase is so large that the entire fediverse, all platforms, is a rounding error by comparison.
So federating with Threads means federating with a userbase that has been algorithmically-conditioned to doomscroll and rage (because that causes “engagement” by which Meta means “ad revenue”) for well over a decade and letting them loose in the fediverse at large.
Fuck that noise.
Let Meta stay in its own smelly shack with the faecal discharge coating the floor, the walls, and the windows. I don’t want that here.
You imagine the doomsctollers aren’t present here already?
They’re here, sure, because they’re everywhere. But the platform doesn’t amplify their addiction via careful rage-baiting algorithmic feeds.