(Esta es la traducción al inglés de mi entrada anterior Meta y el Fediverso)

I'm new to Mastodon, one of those who arrived during the November 2022 migration. But I came to stay. I have followed and participated in the #TertuliaExtraordinaria #MetaEnElFedi debate of the Spanish speaking Fediverse community. After some time of reflection I'm going to express here my provisional position on whether we should block Threads preemptively.

It is possible that by the time this is published the discussion will be exhausted and pointless, maybe the Meta people will sign an agreement only with the three or four larger instances, or maybe they will change their minds about ActivityPub and won’t need us at all. I don’t think that what smaller instances think has much influence on what will happen globally, but it does matter for the members of each instance. A hypothesis: the key to whether Threads applies to federate with the Fediverse will depend on the demands of the European Union (Europe has an influence on global regulation that is rarely remembered) and not on an interest in eating up a space of twelve million users who would immediately flee.

The starting point is clear: those of us here don’t like Meta, we fear an EEE (Embrace, Extend and Extinguish) attack from their side and we also fear the possible consequences of a federation with the Threads instance. But we must stop looking at the situation from our little corner and take a global view. Let’s try. ActivityPub is an open protocol. Communication between (non-blocked) servers should be universal like telephone or mail. We have never blocked @gmail.com or @hotmail.com mails. Are we going to block @threads.com? Blocking Threads is not going to end capitalism. Blocking has to be very well justified and not push us into a corner. Is preemptive blocking necessary? Is it useful?

Threads has not been created against the Fediverse, but against Twitter. That’s not to say that we can’t be collateral damage; being collateral damage is what we must defend against. They promise to integrate the ActivityPub protocol to manage the social graph in a better way and possibly to overcome the conditions imposed by the European Union. That would be a good thing. In fact, moving between instances still causes problems, toots get lost… And the bad things? Slowing down the growth of the Fediverse, buying instances, getting them out of the road because of the new resource demands of a gigantic Fediverse, invasion of unmoderated messages, splitting us (as if we need help for that)… The fundamental problem is that the Threads instance would be a very special, massive, unmoderated instance, managed by algorithms and criteria that we don’t care about and that may harm us. On the other hand I see no point in having the Threads message stream in my federated timeline in Mastodon, only detriments. And Threads is not interested in Mastodon’s timeline, its business is to control what users see.

What can we do? I think we should distinguish between the Meta product and the Instagram-Threads user accounts. I don’t know how this distinction can be made technically, whether with some instances that act as a gateway or with some other solution. In the universal model I was talking about earlier, it would make sense and it would be nice to be able to contact some_friend@threads.com from my Fediverse client. But is a message from me to some_friend@threads.com going to show up on their timeline as a commented retweet or whatever it’s called on Threads, and be subject to the possible hate-fire of that space? A significant percentage of the Fediverse came here for refuge from that. Such an exchange would only be permissible if the messages are private. I have a less strong opinion on whether or not my public toots should be watchable in the Threads timeline (first because they are already public, and secondly because I’m convinced that the algorithm has no interest in showing external, ad-free toots), and on whether there are problems with viewing public posts from some_friend@threads.com on my Mastodon client.

As a very tentative conclusion, I am against treating threads.com as an instance like any other. I am against the appearance of the Threads timeline on my federated timeline. I’m against the messages I exchange with someone being visible there. Is it technically possible to eliminate all these problems and have a functional communication system left, some mechanism for interoperability? I don’t know but I suspect that would be the way to go.