Let's talk about Threads

Alright - so Threads has started to Federate with the rest of us. Some are happy about this, some are angry, some don't care in the slightest.
My feelings are more complicated. Let's discuss.

What is Threads? What is Fedipact?

So in case you're unaware - Threads is Meta/Facebook's Twitter clone and, just so we're clear, I despise Meta/Facebook/Instagram.

Several months ago, when Meta first announced they were going to start federating, I 'signed' a pact to defederate and promptly forgot about it. This seemed like the logical thing to do at the time; seeing a perfect example of a locus swarm coming straight at my favorite field. However, we never actually blocked Threads from our instance. (If you're a member you can see the servers we have blocked here under Moderated Servers.)

While Threads has started to federate with the wider fedi, we can't seem to see any Threads profiles from our server (it returns a 404). ~There's a theory that perhaps Threads preemptively blocked any servers that signed the Fedipact in an attempt to be good neighbors but at this point I don't have any real evidence one way or the other.~ This problem has been resolved! CloudFlare's bot protection was preventing Facebook's server from reaching ours (CF doesn't like Facebook either 😆).

Why does dftba.club care?

To put it simply: John is there and he's not here.
For better or worse, John uses it and his account is now federating.

If not Meta today, then Google tomorrow

Beyond the fact that John is using Threads and we want to interact with him, there's a larger picture here too.

After giving the pact a lot of thought and discussing it with other Mastodon Admins, I've come to realise that the fedipact is a noble idea, but if the fedi is going to be taken seriously it's going to have to learn to play with the bigger fish in the microblogging game; take them on head-to-head and win. Federation is our game afterall.

If the fediverse wants to be taken seriously, it can't live on an ivory tower claiming its superiority; it needs to play the game and win.

Win on features, win on culture, win on happiness.

You don't know a single person on Meta's mod team

So here's why I think Mastodon (and federation) is the answer.

Call me an elder-millennial if you want to, but I seriously miss the innocent days of news groups, IRC, and niche forums made with phpbb. I'm not convinced that worldwide, instant dopamine social media is ever going to be good for our monkey brains. But there is a chance that we have a middle-ground in here somewhere; where small communities can connect to each other while maintaining their own identity, accountability, and community.

You see, I believe that many small, interconnected, non-algorithmic communities is probably the only way we're going to create a social media ecosystem that doesn't make us miserable.

Places like Discord and Mastodon tend to have one really big thing in common: local community governance.
You see, I don't believe that social media moderation is scalable.

• The ratio between users and moderators is usually too high
• The moderators often don't understand a particular community / geographic area's language enough to adequately moderate it
• The moderators are too 'far away' from their users to be directly accountable to them.

The fediverse hasn't entirely made it there yet, having several massive instances; and it has a lot of it's own unique problems (and some of the same ones.) There are unmoderated servers and some really terrible people out there. But small self-regulating communities that fund themselves can handle that.

Control over your own online identity

Personally, I'm cautiously hopeful about Threads Federation. I have zero interest in every having a Meta account [again]. This federation will allow me to interact with users from Threads on my own terms. I want to interact with John (and Hank); they choose to use Threads and I choose not to. Federation provides an opportunity to bridge that divide.

I can't speak for the power users hold on Threads. On Mastodon however, users can block individual users or entire servers (including Threads), choose the visibility of their posts, transfer their accounts to other servers, and completely delete their account if that's what they want to do. There is no algorithm controlling the posts they see. It's just people. Sometimes it's messy - but it's just people. Hopefully, trying to be awesome.

Where do we go from here?

I'm actively working to solve the federation problem with Threads. When I figure that out I'll be sure to let everyone know. If you're not interested in having anything to do with Threads, you can add threads.net to your block list by clicking the more options button on a Threads post or profile and selecting 'Block domain threads.net'

We do have authorized_fetch enabled, so this will prevent Meta from fetching any of your posts from our server.

Finally, I wanted to once again thank our Patrons for their help funding the server and our Moderation Team for working to keep our community a place where we want to hang out.

Thanks for being awesome with us.
If you want to reach out, you know where to find me or you can drop me an email.
dftba

-nomadgeek