Robb. Knight.

Threads started to test ActivityPub integration this week and the fediverse is losing it's collective mind going into overdrive to block them in any way possible so they can't grab all your data. Here's the fun part: they can already do that and they definitely don't need ActivityPub to do that.

Take my profile for example: https://social.lol/@robb. It's all right there for downloading, scraping, or scribbling down in a "robb is very clever and handsome" notebook. The local timeline for social.lol is the same. Ready to be gobbled up into whatever data center Meta want to put it in. This doesn't even take into account that Mastodon has an API that anyone can use. Hell, they could follow the local timeline on Mastodon.social and probably get 90% of the data they want anyway, assuming they want any of it to begin with. Or create an account on a few hundred instances and get the data that way. But they won't because that's not why they're doing this.

They are doing this because they have to. The EU is breathing down all the big tech companies neck's to be more open and interoperable.^[1] They only launched in the EU yesterday and I'd bet my left bollock it took so long because they were doing sneaky shit with tracking that the EU would have fined them for immediately. The EU didn't make Threads illegal like certain tech pundits claimed, Meta were just doing illegal things. Just a little crime, as a treat.

Some instances have already blocked Threads completely meaning their users have no way of intereacting with accounts on Threads. Purely on the basis that it's Meta with no evidence that they're doing anything nefarious or dangerous. Congratulations, you've made your instance worse for your users. By all means, wait and see if federating with Threads becomes a problem, but doing it just because "meta bad" is ridiculous.

Cassidy James:

...defederating from Threads is like an upstart email service blocking their users from being able to email Gmail users because they don’t like Google. That might seem fine on principle, but in reality it just siloes people from their friends — and makes joining the other service more attractive.

What's to be gained from stopping your instance's users following their friends and family who have chosen to use Threads, other than making them switch to another instance? As Cassidy also points out an individual user can block an instance themselves which is the great thing about Mastodon: users have a choice to block or not block whatever they want.

I'm also aware that users also have a choice to move instances and to some extent I agree that if you don't like how your instance is run, you should move to another one.^[2] But how about instead everyone chills out for a minute, maybe give Meta a chance to actual federate real accounts people want to follow, and then decide if they should be blocked or not. How about we don't force hundreds of people to new instances (or worse, Threads) just so they can see the latest minion meme their mum posted.

Yes, it's Meta and they suck and I hate them. But they don't need ActivityPub to grab your data and blocking them for no good reason is just making the Fediverse, and the open web, worse for everyone.