Edit: Poll now closed, results shortly.

Hello all,

I made the decision from the start that Lemmy.zip was an instance for the users and not one that I would push any personal political/social beliefs on to. Therefore in situations like this, I feel it is only right the community makes the decision.

There are many posts detailing the threat that Meta poses to the fediverse, how their strategy is likely to have a negative impact and how user data will be scraped and sold. However, on the flip side Threads is not yet using the ActivityPub protocol so we don’t yet know the impact (if any) that Threads will have on Lemmy instances, given it is more of a Mastadon competitor. Being defederated will mean that users of this instance will not be able to interact with or receive activities from Threads.

So far we’ve not defederated from any instances, instead allowing users to choose what content they want to see and interact with. Unfortunately Lemmy doesnt yet allow users to defederate at user level, which would be the ideal outcome here. So until that feature is implemented, we’ll be looking at an instance wide approach.

Wider discussions (worded far better than anything I can put together) can be found here:

Based on this, below is a link to a poll where you can vote for what you would like to see happen. We will leave the poll open for 24 hours after posting this.

I can only stress that this is not a win-win situation and not everybody will be happy with the result. While I’m happy for debate to take place in the comments, personal attacks are never OK. Please don’t make me ban anyone in this instance for the first time.

The poll is as follows:

Should Lemmy.zip defederate from Threads?

  • Yes
  • No
  • Wait and see the impact Threads has on the Fediverse

Please do vote. Before any action is taken, we’ll look at and share the results of the poll and if there is any ambiguity to the outcome we’ll come back to community.

Finally, this vote is not a permanent decision. If we decide to change the outcome of Threxit, we can hold another vote and review what has changed.

Thanks
Demigodrick and Sami.

  • HeavyRaptorEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    First, thank you for the detailed post and taking measured action.

    While some people raised some food points about the upsides of threads (mainly user influx helping to round out niche communities), I think we just have to be patient while Lemmy takes off on its own. The potential downside of Meta’s influence is just too large.

    I don’t think defederation has to be for ever. We can still play the wait and see approach by defederating now, and if the concerns were false there is still room to undo it (though sadly I doubt it will come to this)