Report – Unsafe: Meta Fails to Moderate Extreme Anti-trans Hate Across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads | GLAAD - might be a reason to defederate from Threads
GLAAD’s Social Media Safety Program reported the following anti-trans hate content across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads; Meta deemed all of it non-violative or did not take action on it.
To add to that. Meta has been found to have used a man in the middle attack to gain acces to data from competing services. Intercepting and selling that user data before it got encrypted. They literally are evil. Do not let them in.
Way ahead of you. What benefit is there even in federating with Threads? I tried looking at the front page and it's almost exclusively "ads as posts" or wannabe influencers trying to attract an audience.
Even wilder, most of the posts Threads show me on the front page have like, less than 10 replies. I saw one (1) post with close to 200 replies. Even the Fediverse has more engagement than this!
This "ads as posts" thing was one of my two biggest concerns with Threads federation. I really hoped I would turn out to be wrong about it, but at the end of the day, both Facebook itself, as well as big social media influencers, rely on advertising for their profits. For anybody looking to avoid ads on Lemmy, it seems like direct federation with Threads is not a good idea currently. On lemm.ee, "no advertising" has been one of our 4 core instance rules from the start.
My other major concern was Threads having the ability to enforce their feed algorithms on federated instances through sheer number of votes on things they show in their feeds, but judging by what you're saying about the engagement, at least that concern has not materialized (at least yet).
For anybody looking to avoid ads on Lemmy, it seems like direct federation with Threads is not a good idea currently.
It will never be a good idea to federated with threads. There will always be some kind of malicious behavior from threads that makes federating with threads a terrible idea.
I follow the Green brothers too and with how much they discuss how social media should be better for humans and all that, it's surprising to me that they aren't on the Fediverse or even talking about it. But they may just be unaware I guess.
The Fediverse is not large enough to replace Twitter/Reddit (for breadth and depth of content) and it is unlikely to become large enough any time soon.
Fortunately, Mastodon does not push an algorithmic feed on me so I can follow people I want to hear from on Threads without having to put up with the bullshit that comes from being on Threads.
I recognise that the lack of moderation on Threads means that instances which do federate may be faced with a lot of extra work and not all instances will be up for that, and that's totally fair.
But it would be good if there was at least one instance which allowed access to people on Threads without having to make an account with Meta.
FWIW it's not a coincidence that Threads didn't make federation possible until after they'd found a legal way to launch in the EU. They knew that if they federated first, the Fediverse would get a lot of EU users who would otherwise have joined Threads. I don't think the entire Fediverse should cut itself off from Threads when many of its users might also like access to the feed without the Meta bullshit piled on top.
But it would be good if there was at least one instance which allowed access to people on Threads without having to make an account with Meta.
I mean, there are plenty of such instances I'm sure. People are of course always free to go to instances that federate with the stuff they want to see.
I don't think moderation is the only reason for defederating with Threads.
Personally, I would like to be able to follow individual Threads users if I so desire but not have Threads content showing up in my All feed. I don't know if that's possible with how federation/individual blocking currently works, but it would be the ideal, I think.
Out of curiosity, would you want Threads users to be able to vote on what you do see on the All feed or should their votes not be counted, just as their content is not shown?
On Mastodon it is possible, when an instance (like Threads) is limited. Limiting is not outright suspending, and limited instance still federates, but its posts and users are not visible unless you explicitly search for them. Also, no one from a limited instance will follow you unless you approve them as a follower.
"Lemmy" is just software, it is not an entity that can federate/defederate as a whole. Instances can federate or defederate. I think most instances have defederated, with the notable exception of the largest instance, lemmy.world (which, again, is not "lemmy").