Threads
Threads, from Meta, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, is the fastest growing social network ever with tens of millions of active users. It’s also about to support the ActivityPub protocol underlying the open Social Web - making it possible for folks on Mastodon servers like sciences.social to follow people on Threads and vice-versa.
Some folks have argued that responsible online communities should preemptively block Threads since Meta has demonstrated lots of bad behavior.
It’s not an easy call, but the moderators and I decided a few months ago that we would take a wait and see approach to Threads. We’ll treat it like other large sites, blocking accounts that violate our rules and interact with our users. If we see too much bad behavior by Threads or its users we’ll block the whole site. This decision is similar to the one taken by datascience.social and mastodon.social.
Note that you can block Threads for your personal account if you want. There are some instructions at the end of this post. And if you would like to migrate your Mastodon account to an instance that pre-emptively blocks Threads, that’s totally understandable too.
The argument against federating with Threads
There are several arguments against federating with threads.
People worry about “Embrace, Extend and Extinguish”. If Threads becomes the dominant player in the fediverse, they will be able to dictate standards and then that make it difficult for others
People don’t want their posts to be indexed and monetized by Threads, nor do they want their data to become part of Threads advertising and AI schemes.
Meta has been a bad actor in the world. We shouldn’t doing anything that helps them succeed.
The most compelling argument against federating that I’ve seen comes from Erin Kissane. It’s worth a read.
The argument for federating
There are two main arguments for federating with Threads.
If we want the open Social Web to become a default communications mechanism and truly displace X and other proprietary platforms, we are going to need many millions of non-techy people to join. That likely means big coroporations are going to need to support them. Very few of us would sign up for a mail server that won’t send to gmail addresses, and arguably Threads is to the fediverse as Gmail is to email.
There’s a lot of people on Threads who we might want to interact with. If you’re like me you probably don’t care what the Kardashians are doing, but there are millions of other people on threads, and I know that there are some that are looking to connect with scientific content.
People like Mastodon Founder Eugene Rochko and Fediverse evangelist Tim Chambers have been making the argument for treating Threads like any other new server.
What you can do as an individual
As a member of a community that is going to federate with Threads, you still can control whether you see any posts from Threads and whether Threads receives posts directly from you. These steps are illustrated at the bottom of this post from infosec.exchange.
- Search for threads.net in the web app
- Click on any account from there
- Use the … dropdown and choose “Block domain threads.net”
One thing that should be clear is that nothing you put out on the public internet is safe from being indexed and searched by Meta or anyone else. There are rules and conventions that the big search engines say they follow, but as long as it is technically possible for people to read your posts without a login, there’s no foolproof protection.