jafo(Apparently) Unpopular Opinion: I think defederating Threads is the wrong move, because it just locks people into Threads. If people on Twitter had the ability to move to Mastodon AND still interact with all the people they did before, I think we would have seen even more people move. The only reason I still check twitter at all is because I have a few close friends who didn’t move. Meta is likely going to have big adoption of people who aren’t ready to go to Mastodon, but are interested in getting out of the dumpster-on-fire that twitter seems to continue to be. But blocking those people from being able to join the more popular Lemmy instances, given no actual policy violations, just will keep people in Meta that otherwise could leave. With the “however” being: It’s not quite clear to me that Threads users will be interacting with Lemmy as much Mastodon, if Threads were a Reddit replacement, it’s more directly connected.
Threads got 80 million users in 48h. Those people are not gonna use Mastodon anyway. They don’t care about their privacy, they don’t care that some proprietary algorithm is gonna decide what they will see, they don’t care that it’s Facebook. Those people have no standards. The only way we can help them is by educating them and if that doesn’t change their mind, then there is nothing we can do, because freedom and privacy is not something they value. People who value them are capable of making a small sacrifice of not using some website when an alternative exists.
Facebook either just wants to use the Fediverse for their own benefit or they want to destroy it before it becomes a bigger competitor. We shouldn’t risk all that we have built just because we live in an ignorant society that doesn’t understand technology.