What would be the problem if Threads federated with Lemmy&co in the future? - eviltoast

I’ve seen a lot of comments suggesting Threads should be pre-emptively defederated by Lemmy/kbin instances if it tries to join us. I’m a bit confused what the problem would be. When Meta does its usual corporate bullshit over at Threads, how would that hurt a user or community based on Lemmy.world? If anything, wouldn’t it give the fediverse a boost if Threads users start discovering communities outside of Meta’s control?

I presume I’m missing something, as you can probably tell I don’t fully understand how Lemmy, Threads or federation all work.

  • Jakwithoutac@feddit.ukEnglish
    231·
    1 year ago

    @Cevilia@Lemmy.blahaj.zone has the most correct answer I think but I want to add my opinion as a refugee.

    Right now newer Fediverse users like myself are experiencing a new level of choice and autonomy that we didn’t get with the other centralised services. EEE is a practice that slowly erodes that freedom by diluting our user base and eventually forcibly absorbing it.

    An analogy:

    The centralised services (Reddit, Facebook, etc) are a city and we used to be citizens. However, we took exception to how the city was being run and protested. In response, we were told ‘tough luck, like it or leave’, so we left and are now outside the city walls.

    We enjoyed a lot of what the city provided so we’ve started our own village and built the tools so that other people can start their own village too, all in the hopes that this collection of villages will eventually function like the city but without the small group of councillors who were in charge of everything.

    Now the councillors are peering over the city walls, seeing that we’ve got some basic services set up and are starting to attract more villagers and that means the stuff we’re making is pretty cool. So they’re expanding their city wall to a point that’s right next to our village and telling their citizens to visit us to look at our cool stuff, and will say that it is actually the city providing the cool stuff because they were generous enough to allow the citizens through a gate. Eventually they’ll try to expand the wall around our village too and the citizens will like this so too few people will say anything about it.

    Now we could just move again and start a new village, but should we have to? Why would we bother when we can just put up a magic invisible wall of our own that stops the city seeing our cool stuff, but still allows the citizens to move to the countryside with us and become villagers.