this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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It's not about pulling the plug. It's about introducing proprietary features that break communication, forcing people off of an independent server and onto Threads.
If most of your IRL friends are on Threads and your experience with them has gotten janky due to Meta fucking with the protocol, it's going to be very difficult to not switch over to Threads.
Oh, and good luck trying to get your friends to switch over to some indie server they've never heard of. If you can do that, then you should run for president.
We are all here because we don’t want to be a part of a corporate controlled social platform. Threads theoretically making it more difficult to communicate with their users - something we can’t do at all today - is not going to suddenly change our minds.
If your friends are on Threads now and you’re on Activity Pub then that problem already exists. If they start seeing all sorts of cool content - without any ads - coming from “that Lemmy thing” then yes absolutely a good number will switch. Not all, because some people are lazy, or don’t care, or fearful of different technology, but that’s not going to change just because Threads is federated.
So basically, the worst thing Meta could do is what the defederators are actively campaigning for: To make it impossible for Threads and the Fediverse to communicate.
The difference is the stage at which they "advocate" for it.
People here are advocating for it now before Facebook has a chance to "embrace" us.
Facebook would only "advocate" for it after they've "embraced" us and started to "extend" ActivityPub with proprietary features that potentially caused issues with Lemmy users.
With the former, Lemmy continues on its own, growing naturally. With the latter, Lemmy users lose contact with communities they've become a part of and may be forced to move to Threads to continue interacting with their communities. That harms Lemmy's active userbase. Additionally, because of how big Threads is, it'd naturally have the largest communities, so other Lemmy users would start using them instead of communities on other instances. That means those communities would shrink and may even die off entirely. When Facebook cuts off ActivityPub support, that'll leave us with several small or abandoned communities. So we'd end up with a smaller userbase and fewer active communities.