It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] admin team
took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their
transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it’s users
will not be allowed to proceed. We strongly encourage other instance...
I disagree with the prevailing sentiment here. Meta using ActivityPub is going to help ActivityPub grow an will be good for federated platforms like lemmy, and mastadon.
Lemmy should not block threads.net. Individual users can simply opt out of using threads, but it's good if we can communicate with people using it and they can communicate with us using a decentralized, free, standard.
I mean maybe, but I can't help to feel a little like this is optimistic speculation, while I've read very well-written arguments for blocking threads.net that seem less (albeit still) speculative. I just don't want to lose what we have, and if we really want to keep growing then we can do so without Meta.
and if we really want to keep growing then we can do so without Meta.
No we cannot. This website is barely usable. The average person doesn't want to use lemmy. They want to hear what their favorite musicians and athletes are up to. They want to use a service that has a massive user base so they can learn new things from experts in various niche fields, etc. They don't want to go to a website with 1000 people who all share the same unpopular political views.
By joining with threads, we make it easier for this average person to switch over to lemmy or mastadon. There is literally no downside to federating with them. They can't shut down smaller instances.
Embrace, extend, extinguish is the fear. Other companies have done it with other open standards, it's a fantastic way for corporations to kill decentralized solutions.
Proprietary/centralized ones just get bought out early on before they capture a large market share. Activitypub has 15 million users on it now, and since it's not a single company that Meta can buy out, they need an alternative approach to destroy it.