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.)
Meta are performing what is called an EEE attack (Embrace, Extend, Extinguish). Basically, it involves a larger corporation creating a thing that hooks into an open standard, artificially inflating it, slowly adding new, proprietary closed-source features that other members of the open standard cannot use, and eventually removing support for the open standard entirely, forcing other users to enter their walled garden because that’s where all the people are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Large numbers of people are saying that Meta is doing this. And then people are quoting each other saying that, linking to the same article over and over, and whipping themselves up into a frenzy demanding that everyone defederate with anyone who’s not defederating with Meta (even though it’s not even possible to federate with Meta yet - Threads still hasn’t implemented ActivityPub).
It’s currently just a big moral panic and I’m awaiting some kind of actual evidence that there’s a real problem here.
I’m wondering what they could possibly even Extend in a way that the Fediverse can’t keep up? The most they can do is to gatekeep people who are only in their ecosystem, but… they already do that. Whoever is only on Facebook and Instagram is only on Facebook and Instagram, and it didn’t stop the Fediverse from existing.
I’m on kbin.social and when I go to /d/threads.net it is very active. I would not be able to go there if they haven’t implemented activitypub and federated.
/d/ is a domain, not an instance
If you look at the activity of https://kbin.social/d/threads.net those are hyperlinks to threads.net
Neat, this is news to me. Last I heard they hadn’t pulled the trigger on that. The sky doesn’t seem to have fallen as a result, yet.
While I wish ActivityPub was GPLv3, it is at least under the MPL, and they are going to have a hard time introducing proprietary closed-source features on a communication platform that requires them to share the source code.
EEE is definitely the SOP, but I’m not sure how that’s supposed to work here. I don’t think there are that many users to steal away from Mastodon et al, compared to how they did with XMPP, for example.