Their goal is to lure (probably former reddit or twitter) users to Threads

Their goal is to take users from Twitter, and by doing that they are opening the opportunity to get users from Twitter to the Fediverse.

There has to be at least one major news org who is looking at this and thinking “well, if Threads does bring a few hundred million people to the Fediverse, we’ll be able to drop Twitter and integrate our CMS with the Fediverse like Wordpress.”

Google was not charging people to talk on their network, and they didn’t make it harder to reach someone once they got it. So there was no reason for people to jump out. Facebook, on the other hand…

When the internet was in its infancy, companies and small businesses first established their online presence by getting a aol.com or hotmail.com. Running your own email or website was still expensive and not something easy to do. Today, having “your own” social media and being in control of your brand is almost as easy as having your website and your domain. I am not saying that everyone will jump out of Threads, but if Threads ever gets successful enough to replace Twitter and if we don’t shut them out of the Fediverse before it happens, at least there will be an opportunity for small businesses/media orgs/influencers that want to keep reaching their audiences (like they do today on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube/etc) and also want to take control of their own presence.

The fact that you missed the sarcasm and doubled down by leaning on your credentials is a-do-ra-ble.

For someone with so much time to go to classes at community colleges, surely you can spare some minutes to run your own instance, no?

Here you go. Go create your own instance and show us how it is done.

If the “vast majority of lemmy users” start demand things from their admins while excusing themselves from contributing in any meaningful way, yes, I’d disregard their opinions as well.

“Skin in the Game” is important. If you are not willing to risk anything for what you believe in, then how do you expect anyone else to take you seriously?

So, you have absolutely nothing to offer but somehow you think we should be giving any weight to your opinion?

Nothing ever stopped you from creating you own instance. With blackjack and beers.

There are vulnerable groups of people who have a harassment risk against them.

People that are at risk for what they write on the public internet should be protected and empowered by having better privacy tools, not by pretending that they can have a “safe space” on the public internet.

There is no such thing as privacy on the internet. The Fediverse makes it seem that it mitigates the surveillance problem by spreading the information around and not having it under the control of one single large entity, but the truth is that the Fediverse makes it actually easier for dedicated malicious actors to collect data and reach their targets.

That’s the thing: actions from other users and from the key players are not “independent”. It is a social network, actions and reactions depend on the context and the relationships of everyone involved.

Do they want us to let them federate so that their users can use Threads as a stepping stone out of the walled gardens?

It’s nice and cosy and rather friendly here

And absolutely irrelevant in terms of impact. We have at best a few hundred MAU on a good month. Facebook/Google/TikTok are controlling billions of people.

If we truly believe in the superiority of the Fediverse and that it is possible to have an alternative social media for everyone, we need to go and fight Big Tech. Defederating on the grounds of “I like it the way it is” is coward, selfish and completely lacking ambition.

Last I checked, the people using XMPP are still running happily using servers and clients.

All 17 of them.

public timelines, enable whitelist federation and require authorized fetch for federating

And all of that can be circumvented by pulling the data via the RSS feeds or plain old scraping.

Authorized fetch and domain blocks may be effective to stop drive-by trolls, but do nothing to stop anyone with a minimal amount of resources and interest in scraping data from a social network.

The reality is simple: all information that you put on the web should be considered as publicly available. Those that want or need absolute privacy should not use information in the fediverse and resort only to provably secure communication protocols.

Why is your account marked as a bot?

The Facebook hatred is understandable and justified, but defederating with Threads is a misguided idea:

• Federation is not required for them to be able to pull the data. Even if you block an instance, they can still pull whatever they want.
• By closing down with Threads, you’ll be basically guaranteeing that that all the millions of people that are there will never be able to migrate away.
• By getting major (current) instances to defederate with Threads, it gets easier for Threads to just say “hey, we tried to be open but they still rejected us, so we are just going to go back to our walled garden.”

They could solve your last point by providing a community forum like Discourse or even Lemmy, and saying that support for the packaged software is an extra charge.

It’s still baffling for me that none of their “budget-cloud” (Hetzner, OVH) providers have not gotten into this segment of taking open source packages and offer as a turn-key system.

Facebook didn’t kill XMPP, how would they kill the existing alternatives?

Not everyone, but it seems like a substantial part of them. Anyway, I am saying it is only wrong in the scenario where Lemmy has a more sizeable userbase.

Still, not a justification to keep the mirrors. That’s why I disabled most of them.

This is not about “my services”, this is about getting people to migrate away from walled gardens like Reddit and Discord. People are more likely to act if they hear from someone closer to them, don’t you think?