On Reddit, I was mainly subscribed to a few niche subreddits. By reddit’s standards, that’s still like 100k subscribers. But over here, even though there might be 1000 people subscribed to those same niche communities, the 90-9-1 rule still applies. Either the community has one super-spammy power user trying to boost life into the community, or there’s just no one actually posting anything.

I’m getting enough of a fix to stay on Lemmy and wade out the peace and quiet, but I do long for the engagement of 50k+ users on a truly niche topic. My willingness to stay on Lemmy has been helped by me starting to re-utilize off-site forums specifically to those niches. But I can totally understand how it just feels dead to a lot of the Reddit exodus.

Full disclosure, I’ve been labeled as an astroturfer because of my optimism for Threads federating. So, take that as you will.

But I think that there’s a lot more nuance to it than what you’ve said. I personally don’t defend Threads, but I do defend Threads federating. I’m on Lemmy specifically because I don’t want to be on Threads. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want to connect with Threads content and users.

deleted by creator

To clarify, my post is trying to highlight that Threads will exist with or without us. If they want to join the Fediverse, and we refuse and wall their garden for them, that does nothing to stop their growth and profit immensely. However, we lose the opportunity to connect with their users and content, and we lose any chance we have to convince them off of Threads. If they remain federated, we can offer the identical content they’re used to while promoting privacy and self reliance.

On the offset chance I do hook you back in;

It’s not the company I’m interested in connecting with, it their users. If my friend opts to join Threads, I won’t be holding him against Meta’s collaboration with Rohingya’s genocide, but would love to still be able to interact directly with their content (and vice versa).

Not quite sure how to get you past feeling like I’m astroturfing. I guess take a look at my 11 years of Reddit history under the same username?

Also, how can you claim I can’t comprehend your points if this is your first comment you’ve sent me 😅

Thanks for taking the time to answer.

I guess anytime I say “we”, I mean people who value freedom, privacy, self-reliance, and decentralization. The kinds of people who the Fediverse purports to attract. I guess my questions mainly stem from a lack of understanding of how blind defederation is supposed to be a tactic to protect people who I’ve classified as the group “we”. We’re not going to ever go to threads. Others here may, because they are willing to forfeit their personal data, but not us.

Most of the sentiment I’ve seen demanding defederation seems to imply that our group and ideologies of freedom/privacy/self-reliance will be undermined by the mere connection with the Threads userbase. You mention that people on Threads will likely stay on Threads. Why would we expect differently for “us” staying on non-corporate Fediverse?

What I do know is that the concept of the Fediverse is very novel for the vast majority of people, even to people who value their freedom (but just hasn’t thought to look, or what to look for). That will not be the case much longer now that the big guys have stepped in.

I guess it boils down to pessimism vs optimism. In my optimistic view (even with a pessimistic understanding of corporates greed) there’s no harm in establishing the connection and playing it by ear as an opportunity to educate. And if we “wall the garden” for them, I don’t see how that would protect the Fediverse, aside from perhaps preventing new flavors of content.

Thanks for taking the time to answer. I did read all of it, and was planning on responding to each individual point, but it all kind of melded into one combined thought.

I guess from what I’m thinking, it’s sounding like this is the pessimistic expectation:

• Threads will do all that they can to entice people onto their platform.
• They will go for people with low standards of privacy and high expectations of networking, and try and win them over with features.
• Once they’ve been won over, they become Meta’s product, and once they have enough products they will cut ties and leave us high and dry.

But, if we “make a stand” against it now, because we expect to be a frog in boiled water if we don’t, how exactly does that improve the above outlook? We’ve walled the garden for them. The people with lower standards will be won over by default.

I guess it may just be a difference of opinion, where you think it protects us, but in my view it just makes the decision easier for those individuals since they are forced to choose. I’m thinking that with coexistence comes the opportunity to rip users of similar ideologies over to our side while Threads grows.

I came over as a Reddit refugee, and really like the idea of fostering communities with like-minded individuals. That’s why I have founded 5 already, which replicate what I was missing from Reddit.

The last few comments directly before/after this post are the result of continuing my full train of thought, looking for clear answers, in a more visible format than the comments of a lemmy.ca post. From what I understood about the fediverse, I was surprised to see communities blindly defederating when it didn’t seem to be fully thought through (although I admittedly am new here, so I may just not understand). But that was the impetus of my questions.

As of me writing this comment, I have not found understandable answers to my questions yet.