Meta just announced that they are trying to integrate Threads with ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, etc.). We need to defederate them if we want to avoid them pushing their crap into fediverse.
If you’re a server admin, please defederate Meta’s domain “threads.net”
If you don’t run your own server, please ask your server admin to defederate “threads.net”.
It’s a similar situation as with the unions. We can all manage to have a pay rise by ourselves. Or, we unionize and ask together for the pay rise.
Defederating the instance is like unionizing. We all go forward instead of individually to have weight. This weight is in form of killing asap the federating attempt, as threads.net users will have nothing to see in the Fediverse. If you let each user manage the situation, threads.net can do whatever they want. There is no individual responsibility in this case. We have to play collectively.
We need to play collectively because the Fediverse isn’t one monolithic network, unlike Meta. It’s a federated network. It’s each instance and Meta. This is why unionizing is important. It’s the Fediverse and Meta. This is the magic of activity pub. You can let others use the protocol but say no to the interaction with them.
The second aspect is that Meta is relying on “cognitive capitalism”. Meta will use free cognitive time from the Fediverse to capitalize. This has huge implication on mental health and all kind of minorities relying on the Fediverse for various reasons. We can say all together no to this, what isn’t possible individually. I recommend the book “The Soul at Work From Alienation to Autonomy” by Franco “Bifo” Berardi. It’s a good book to understand the issue with Meta and others.
Look, I hate Meta as much as the next person, but they really don’t have that much leverage over the Fediverse as people are making it seem. It is completely optional to follow their accounts so they have little direct control over people’s feeds, not to mention that their active userbase is quite small. I’d say a better approach is simply restricting interaction by making it opt-in in all ways, just like social.coop.