After moving here from lemmy.world after learning of their view on federation with Threads, I now face a dilemma which I do not have a clear answer to.

Should I continue contributing to my niche communities on Instances federating with Threads, or build similar communities on other Instances blocking Threads?

I have a feeing this issue is not a one off, but a common one going forward, so it’s better to settle it once and for all. Below is my thought so far. What would you do in my case?

I love to post or comment on my favourite niche communities to share my experience with others and grow them. Those communities are small in size and they usually exist in certain instances only.

One one hand, having everyone in the same place would be much more beneficial since the community is not split and spread across the fediverse. We would also have better discussions with people from different background and diverse point of views.

On the other hand, I do not feel my contribution is in the right place anymore, if let’s say I post on lemmy.world. I don’t want Threads to benefit from my posts/comments and I want people to join Lemmy. Why would Threads users join Lemmy if they could subsribe to our communities?

I wish my communities were instance-independent so this barrier can be removed. I can create a similar community here but it is the last thing I would want to do.

Having written all these down, I realised this was exactly the same situation how I came to Lemmy from reddit, i.e. communities split across Internet due to issues we have with the platform/instance we are on. I guess discussion on platform/instance-independent communities can be a topic of its own

Edit: formatting and clarified my points and updated my question to reflect that

  • @[email protected]OPEnglish
    3•1 year ago

    They will federate with Threads. If I continue posting on lemmy.world, Threads will benefit from it and Threads users would never join Lemmy because they could subscribe to our communities. But I also don’t want to split my niche communities

    • @ContramuffinEnglish
      8•1 year ago

      To be clear, lemmy.world isn’t federating with Threads. They’re taking the wait-and-see approach, which means that they’ll make that decision later.

      I’m not happy with that decision, but it is distinctly different from saying that they will federate with Threads.

      • @[email protected]OPEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        According to Lemmy documentation, if they don’t block a server, it means they are federating (aka talking using ActivityPub protocol) with that server.

        Lemmy has three types of federation:

        • Allowlist: Explicitly list instances to connect to.
        • BlockList: Explicitly list instances to not connect to. Federation is open to all other instances.
        • Open: Federate with all potential instances.

        Federation is enabled by default.

        It means Meta could in theory talking right now with instances not blocking them as part of their testing.

        I don’t know why they could not just block in the first place, then unblock/allow later if it makes sense.

    • @ritswdEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Hm, my understanding from Lemmy.world’s post was “guys, we’re years away from it if it ever happens, maybe we should chill until we learn more?”

      My personal bet is that Threads will never actually implement ActivityPub anyway. The announcement of it sounds great for shareholders to see a differentiation with Twitter on the short term, but making it really has so many uncontrollable scale hurdles that I’d bet it will be given up before it’s real.

      But whether my guess is correct or not, Lemmy.world admin’s point is factually correct: right now, this whole thing is just a lot of hot air.

      (Also, I’m intrigued, I think you might be the only person, when moving instance out of disagreement with an admin, to join one where the admins are known to be Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea. With the point of Lemmy to have very diverse viewpoints, obviously that’s all your choice and you should be where you think you should be, but of all instances out there to join to seek alignment with admins, I wouldn’t have thought Lemmy.ml would be one people would turn to a lot, since it’s been controversial exactly for that, and there are many many others. Heh, you do you.)

      • @[email protected]OPEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        the admins are known to be Uyghur genocide deniers and pro-North-Korea

        Do you have a link for this? I want to read it. I picked lemmy.ml because it was used by Memmy app community, has decent userbase, and they block threads.net. This is the description on https://join-lemmy.org/instances : “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers”

        my understanding from Lemmy.world’s post was “guys, we’re years away from it if it ever happens, maybe we should chill until we learn more?”

        Did they post their official’s stance on it? All I saw was a post by ruud, the instance owner on Mastodon

        As I explained in another comment, if they don’t block a server, they are federating with it. Meta could be testing as we speak

        • @ritswdEnglish
          2•1 year ago

          Yeah, I initially thought it was a rumor, but then I was shown the receipts, and unfortunately it’s true: https://lemmy.world/comment/562635 It is really disappointing…

          About the Lemmy.world situation, here’s where I draw my understanding from: https://lemmy.world/post/1274909 Meta said they wouldn’t even start looking at it before being at 1 billion users, so they are not going to be testing anything any time soon; which is also why I’m not buying too strongly that they actually intend to do it. I commented on the post with my thinking. Once they’re that far along (if they even get there), they will have proven their currently implemented strategy, that they don’t actually need to federate with anything to do the Twitter-but-better that they clearly set out to do. I’m totally guessing though so I could be wrong.

        • @ritswdEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          So, they’re spiking on it, which isn’t particularly surprising at this stage. In fact they have to since they’re a public company, they can’t make announcements that they’re spending R&D on something, and not spend it, that would be SEC fraud. I’m still not buying that it’s in their interest enough that they would actually put it out there. This feels like such a heavy engineering lift, for little upside besides the compelling differentiation story to tell.

          Also, based on their communications so far, they mean to federate with Mastodon, but they don’t care much about Lemmy. Which makes sense, their shareholders have massively heard of Mastodon, but not Lemmy. Even if they release something, I bet it will be federation with some specific Mastodon servers that they know will treat them well.

          Maybe I’m wrong, that’s completely possible. If they start federating with Lemmy.world, I’m squarely in the “then we should defederate now” camp. But at this point this feels like so much hot air and speculation, that I’m not even sure why it’s being talked about so much.

          • @[email protected]OPEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            I am sure they will come after reddit next :)

            Edit: regarding people’s interest in this, many projects/people have been burnt before by megacorps so its definitely worth having our guard up to anticipate what might happen in the future