Our Position On Blocking Threads
We've been discussing this a lot both within the team, and with our Patrons. Here's what Fosstodon will be doing about Threads federation.
Before we get into this, I wanted to give some context. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg decided to make some significant changes to how Meta products and services are moderated, and the general consensus to these changes is that it’s all bad.
This could mean more extremism, more abuse, and general more shittery for the fediverse as Threads now federates. With that in mind, lots of our fellow instance admins have been considering whether they should de-federate with Threads.
Many have.
I’ve written about my personal opinions on the matter before, but this isn’t about me, it’s about the 60,000 or so people that call Fosstodon home. So the rest of the team and I have been discussing the whole thing. A lot.
We discussed it as a team, and after lots of discussion we were erring toward not de-federating with Threads as people have the option to personally defederate.
But we wanted a pulse check from the community, so we decided to put a poll on Patreon that asked our patrons to give their opinion as they’re a good cross-section of our community. After 299 votes and lots of conversation in the comments, the results were in:
A lot of the discourse in the comments aligned with the discussion we had as a team in our Mattermost chat.
As a result, we have decide NOT to de-federate with Threads.
Why?
This decision may piss some of you off. We get it. But when making these decision, we have to consider all 60k of the users on our platform. And the fact is, many would like the option of communicating with folk on Threads.
That said, there is an option to block Threads in its entirety for your account. Had this option not been in place, we may have gone down the de-federation route, but since everyone on Fosstodon can personally block Threads, we felt it prudent to keep the doors open for those that want to step through.
For those that don’t, you can quickly and easily slam that door shut and deadlock the shit out of it.
How to block Threads on your account
If you’re one of the people who still want to block Threads on your account, it’s very easy to do.
Firstly, log into your Fosstodon account on the web interface, then go to the search bar at the top left of the page and search for @zuck@threads.net. Alternatively, just click this link to be taken straight to Zuck’s Threads profile on Fosstodon.
Once there, click on the 3 dots next to the Follow button, and select the option to Block domain threads.net.
That’s it. All of Threads should now be blocked for your account.
Will this change in the future?
The short answer is possibly. We will continue to monitor the situation closely and if we see a lot of abuse coming from Threads to Fosstodon, we will re-think the decision and probably de-federate with them.
At the moment though, Threads users are generally good fedi citizens. We have around 3,300 people following over 9,000 accounts on Threads and we have only received 2 reports for them. One of which was someone reporting the account just because they were on Threads. The other was because a Walking Dead meme didn’t have a content warning.
Final thoughts
This may not be the decision that some of you want to hear, but like I said earlier, we have to think of the collective, rather than the few. Especially since you can all block Threads in a couple of seconds and be done with it.
If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch with us, either via email, or on the fedi.