IMHO defederating from Threads is like an upstart email service blocking their users from being able to email Gmail users because they don’t like Google. That might seem fine on principle, but in reality it just siloes people from their friends—and makes joining the other service more attractive. 🤷‍♂️

If we want people to use and discover the goodness of Mastodon, we should federate, *and then* let ’em know how much nicer it is over on this side—all while being happy we can interact w/our friends.

Because my alternatives are:

• Convince all of my real-world friends to uproot their entire social graph for my personal benefit (not going to happen, as we’ve seen time and time again)

• Just create an account on the Facebook-owned platform to keep in touch with them (no thank you, you see how that’s worse, right?)

• Decide to lose contact with real-world friends over social media platforms (dumb)

And *you* as an individual can block Threads all *you* want, and I won’t fault you for making that decision for yourself! That’s a neat thing about the ownership over our own experiences we have on the Fediverse and Mastodon.

But calling for *the entire open web* to cut them off just doesn’t sit well with me. 🤷‍♂️ Hopefully over time, I can convince more of my friends over on Instagram and Threads to come over here to non-Meta-owned platforms—but it’s hard to do that if I can’t even talk to them.