It should come as no surprise that the 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 administrators to do the same, given the grave threat they pose to the fediverse.
It's pretty damn simple actually. Let's say we fully federate with Threads, what will happen?
Threads gets a massive amount of users, they already have 20 million sign-ups on the first day! Their user base will be gigantic
We'll get a big influx of content (if Meta does the federation properly), huge communities will pop up on Threads and you'll join those communities. It's unlikely that Threads users will join communities hosted on smaller instances, why join a community with 1k users if Meta has one with 200k?
Now Meta controls 99% of the users AND content. They can switch off federation at any moment. Maybe they cover it with "we have a new cool feature, but it breaks federation, sorry!" in that moment all our Lemmy instances lose most of their users and content. And you lose all your communities you joined
Lemmy users will migrate to threads, because they want their content back, the fediverse dies (except for a few hundred to thousand hold-over nerds who won't give up)
Fuck Meta.
Damn thinking about this, this is exactly what Reddit did with 3rd party apps
Embrace openness by allowing 3rd party apps on the platform and gain user base in the process
Once user base is high enough, start introducing features that aren’t available (chat, polls) in the API to entice users to abandon 3rd party apps for new features
Once the users is high enough, cut 3rd party apps the fuck off and coerce users to use their app with no alternatives. Terminally online users won’t ask questions and will transition without hesitation to the official app to get their subreddit community fix.