I love the fact that fediverse was built from the ground up to be free, federated and interoperable. I have two questions that may come from my lack of expertise / knowledge, so I apologise in advance if they are dumb.

Bots can disrupt smaller instances:

What is stopping corpos from scraping everyone's posts and stuff from the fediverse and train their AI? What's stopping them then, to create loads of not accounts and spam / disrupt smaller communities? When an instances quality drops, the users may be more incentivised to migrate to bigger instances and go there. It's safe to say most Lemmy users are not going to spin their own instance and start communities from scratch. Meanwhile, the onslaught of bots can overwhelm these budding communities and instances.

Corpos can flood the fediverse with ads and crap:

Threads comes to mind on this point and how many instances have chosen not to defederate with them. Besides, they can create bridges, and have repost bots in all instances to flood major them with ads. With generative content, it is so much easier to make a seemingly casual post about a product and mask it as an advertisement.

I've seen previous posts about people wanting to come because of their opinion about how certain countries behave. I feel the true evil are the corporates.

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[–] totallyNotARedditor@lemm.ee 8 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Am I reading this right? Meta tried to be compatible with Lemmy and every server owned agreed to mass block them and leave them out?

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Threads is twitter style (like Mastodon) so it's not going to have much to do with Lemmy. Threads allows users to opt-into a sort of half-Federation where Mastodon users can follow their content. It's a unique case and not how Federation normally works.

With Mastodon, content from users on other instances is not "downloaded" unless someone on that instance specifically chooses to follow it. So it's not like every small Mastodon instance that federates with threads is going to be overwhelmed by all the millions of user feeds on Threads.

Tbh there is a lot of misunderstanding surrounding Threads federation, but in short- there is no technical way for them to "extinguish the fediverse" even if they really, really, wanted to.

[–] moody@lemmings.world 15 points 1 day ago

Not every instance blocked them, but many did.

The fear of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish got a hold of the fediverse when Threads was originally announced.

[–] haverholm@kbin.earth 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not Lemmy specifically, but the broader fediverse (and probably mostly the microblog part dominated by Mastodon and its forks)

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Most of the core mastodon servers haven't blocked threads..

[–] haverholm@kbin.earth 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I don't know how you define "most" or "core" here, but it's certainly true that mastodon.social and its ~400K users remain federated with Threads.

A lot of instances did block or limit them though, and I'm not going to sit down and calculate which side is in majority 🤷

[–] naught101@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Most by number of users, I'd guess.

I'm on mastodon.social, and basically never see threads posts.

[–] Kirk@startrek.website 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

Threads accounts (or any account) won't federate to your instance unless you (or someone on your instance) specifically requests to follow. It's a common misunderstanding when people think that federating with Threads.net will "overwhelm" a small instance.

[–] lol_idk@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 day ago

You can block Threads yourself even if your instance doesn't