Afaik, whenever an Activitypub instance has defederated from another it has always had to do with some combination of bad user behavior, poor moderation, and/or spam. Are the various instance admins who have decided to preemptively block threads.net simply convinced that these traits will be inevitable with it? Is it more of a symbolic move, because we all hate Meta? Or is the idea to just maintain a barrier (albeit a porous one) between us and the part of the Internet inhabited by our chuddy relatives?
(For my part, I’m working on setting up my own Lemmy and/or Pixelfed instance(s) and I do not currently intend to defederate.)
You shouldn’t underestimate it either. Even if this isn’t their intention now, it’s something they could easily do whenever they feel like it, and do you really trust Meta to have that power?
I don’t think it’s possible to take down decentralized social media unless it fails by itself, unless the ecosystem here is so completely unappealing people decide to get back to all the well known ills and dullness of Facebook.
Even compared to XMPP, it’s not the same. Chat programs are a communication tool. Social platforms are communities.
I am not underestimating them, I don’t know why this insistence that I must be. I think people are catastrophizing and spelling doom forgetting that we are seeing tech companies fucking up time after another, and also not giving enough credit to the advantages and potential that we have here.
If you think all it takes is peeking over the fence and the Fediverse will fall apart, the maybe it could never be. But I think the interest in something different will only grow now. I believe we can take users out of Meta instead.