Mindly.Social's response to Meta's Threads
UPDATED 01/20/2025
As of 01/20/2025, Mindly.Social has limited Threads which will hide content from their service in public feeds while letting our users still follow and interact with people on that platform. This seems like the best compromise since we have users following over 600 accounts on Threads and a full defederation would prevent them from interacting with those users entirely. Our users have the ability to completely block them if they'd like to for their individual account and if we start getting any reports or start seeing any heinous content we may completely suspend the instance (as we would any other instance).
Below is the original post if you'd like to read KuJoe's original reasoning for not wanting to defederate/suspend Threads from interacting with Mindly.Social and its users.
I guess it's time to talk about the Mastodon, I mean elephant in the room. Threads.
It seems like this discussion has been going on for ages although I only learned about Meta/Facebook's plans to join the Fediverse recently and even after hearing about it I learned absolutely nothing about this "Project 92" people were talking about because there was no information about it except for a few news articles I could find which appeared to be mostly PR/marketing speak.
One thing that was immediately obvious to me was that a lot of users were split as to whether this was a good or bad thing. I was indifferent because it had no effect on how I operated Mindly.Social and I wasn't going to pick a side because it didn't matter. To me Threads is just another server joining the Fediverse, if they're nice we don't block them and if they're not nice we block them. Simple as that. If users would like to block them based on principal that's perfectly fine also, I love that users have the ability to control what they do and don't see.
For me personally, I am not a fan of Meta at all. I don't have any accounts with them and aside from the Quest 2 in my living room (using my wife's account) I don't interact with their platforms at all. I see them as every other massive corporation who profits off of people and can't be bothered to pay taxes, they're awful and shouldn't exist. I think a lot of people on Mastodon would agree with that sentiment. I don't feel that way about the users on their platform though. Admittedly, all of my real life friends and family are on Facebook and I haven't kept up with maybe 99% of them since I deleted my account ages ago. I'm okay with that, it's definitely their choice. I couldn't convince them to switch to Twitter back in 2014 so I doubt I could convince them to switch to Mastodon in 2023, but maybe Meta can? Maybe Threads might reconnect me with some of those people again, who knows? I know this is a very selfish thing for me to say, but if I'm thinking it then at least a few other people are also, maybe some of those people are on Mindly.Social, who knows?
As we get closer to Threads being connected to the Fediverse a lot of people are expecting me to make a decision about what to do. The first thing I did was talk to the other staff. Our decision was unanimous so I started a poll and asked the community how they felt, it was a 50/50 split in the replies and the poll itself was 58% in favor for pre-blocking Threads before they joined, but it was quickly pointed out to me that people other than Mindly.Social users were voting so I focused on the replies more than the poll results. Then it came down to researching what Threads was and how it could possibly effect the users of Mindly.Social. I read a lot of blogs, a lot of posts, and a lot of articles about Threads and how it would impact the Fediverse when they joined. The amount of information was overwhelming spelling out the end of the Fediverse as we knew it and calling for defederating with them before they could join to send a message. During that researching phase I found only 2 blog posts that stood out to me as giving me any real hope in the matter.
The first post was by Tim Chambers and outlined the biggest concerns about Threads and explained why those concerns weren't worth being concerned about. It also did however point out what we should be concerned about and what we had to do to fix those issues and that information really pointed out that just blocking Meta from the Fediverse won't stop or help anything, we need to focus on the issues that were here before Meta was even considering joining and fix those problems.
The second post was by Eugen Rochko, the founder of Mastodon and who probably had the most insight into how his application (the one we use on Mindly.Social) would handle Threads being connected to it. While I'll admit I've had issues with decisions he's made in the past, this blog post did put my mind at ease quite a bit. My biggest concern here is he made no statement about whether or not he'd let Meta influence the future of Mastodon. Thankfully, the Fediverse is massive and Mastodon only makes up a piece of it so if needed we can move over to one of the independently maintained forks of it.
The amount of in fighting and personal attacks were so exhausting to see for weeks and weeks at a time just because admins wouldn't run their servers the way other people wanted them to. It was really disheartening that people wanted to turn a decentralized platform into something else. And yes, I agree that a "secret" meeting with signed NDAs where the people meeting with Meta couldn't talk about anything including whether they were there or not is extremely gross and should never have happened, especially if the results of those talks could have an impact on the existing communities. That's something I will never get behind and is yet another reason to add to the growing list of why I dislike Meta.
The growing concerns about privacy on the Fediverse when Meta joins also got me thinking and so I basically rushed to get this page created so users could see what steps they could take to safeguard their privacy and what we do at Mindly.Social also. One of my favorite things about Mastodon is the amount of control a user has over their own social network. Even if they're part of a bigger server, they still have some tools in place that give them the freedom to curate their home timeline to fit their needs.
Now that I've explained the journey, let's talk about the destination. I was finally (indirectly) asked today what Mindly.Social will be doing about this whole situation and here's the answer:
Mindly.Social will not be defederating with Threads or any other instance based on who they do or do not federate with at this time. If in the future Threads becomes harmful for our users, becomes an added burden for our staff, or negatively impacts our infrastructure we will be happy to defederate with them. Users have the option to block any domains they do not wish to interact with and we fully support their decision regardless of what they choose.