The fediverse is discussing if we should defederate from Meta’s new Threads app. Here’s why I probably won’t (for now).
(Federation between plume and my lemmy instance doesn’t work correctly at the moment, otherwise I would have made this a proper crosspost)
I’m going to go against the grain here and say that there’s a lot of gatekeeping and shaming going on, especially against the Mastodon owners who are thinking about federating with Meta’s instance.
Federating with Meta’s servers should be a choice. If people want the ability to interact with celebrities and normies, that would be a huge boost to ActivityPub and Mastodon in general, especially for the servers that do end up federating with Meta. Their users would be able to interact and follow all of the mainstream people who are not on Mastodon.
It should be always be a choice. And for those servers that don’t federate, things will remain the same. Don’t try to gatekeep or spread FUD, it just makes you look paranoid and insular.
That’s not what gatekeeping means.
There’s peer pressure going on right now encouraging Mastodon instance owners not to federate with Meta’s Threads. How is that not gatekeeping?
Gatekeeping is keeping someone without access/power on the outside. People who are already running instances have by definition passed the gate.
I don’t know if gatekeeping is the right word but some people treat you like traitors if you even suggest that federating with Meta might be a valid option. Just look at the upvote/downvote ratio of this post and some comments I got. Some people are very entrenched in their opinion and I wouldn’t be surprised to soon see posts with “We must defederate from everyone who federates with Meta”.
Indeed, that is not gatekeeping. It’s applying social and moral pressure. Similar to a boycott campaign, protest, etc. Such methods are intended to discomfit and inconvenience. They’re used in situations where being nice and getting along are determined to be nonviable strategies for getting the desired result.
Those methods in themselves are morally neutral; the question is, are they employed for a reason which justifies and necessitates them, i.e., how serious is a thread does Facebook pose to the fediverse. (I think it’s reasonable to take facebook as an evil seriously and to not give them an inch.)
That’s definitely already happening. This is a normal part of federation, tbh. Instances block instances that federate with bad actors because they want to limit as much as possible their exposure to/involvement with those actors, as well as to place pressure on others to do the same. Obviously not everyone considers facebook to be a bad actor, but it’s not surprising that those who do would act accordingly.
It’s people’s choice to earn the ire of others. It’s their choice to federate with Threads, and it’s my choice to defederate from them as a result.
And that’s within your right too. It goes both ways.