Yasbarista: Green Tea Latte expert :flag_agender:🏳️‍⚧️ on Nostr: I think enough people have talked about the technical hell aspects of Threads ...

I think enough people have talked about the technical hell aspects of Threads federating with us, but I want to touch up on the cultural and sociological aspects of Federation. If you want a look at that, I’m not your guy.

The Fediverse has a culture — or more appropriately, cultures. Each server has their own culture and each portion of the Fediverse has their own culture. Just like the Fediverse itself, the Fediverse cultures are interoperable and interlinked, but still separate.

Culture is who we are, what we are, and how we express them. A good example is that the Fediverse has a general culture of adding content warnings and AltText. This is not a rule (although instances can make it a rule — ie part of their codified culture).

This is a cultural norm. A standard that we follow and expect others to follow, and for others to become part of our culture to follow. Other examples can be the implicit and explicit support for minorities — that’s a cultural standard. The bounty of the Fediverse is that the cultures form organically. There is no outside hand determining it.

Now let us compare Threads. We know that their “forty million” users (I hesitate to consider this number real in any way) do not have an organic culture. It’s brand new but however there is no Threads culture because the users of Threads have bought their cultural baggage with them from other corporate platforms. In addition, we know that Zucc’s algorithm means that any organic culture that may form is stymied by a algorithmic focus on growth.

In addition, the culture of Threads is fostered in isolation to that of the Fediverse’s culture. If you spin up a new general purpose instance right now, you are expecting that your Instance and your users will create their own culture that is interoperable with the greater Fediverse.

Threads users may not even know the Fediverse exists, so why care about our culture? Why care about our norms? Their cultural norms and behaviour is wildly different to ours because they have no awareness of ours.

That means that when Threads federates — even with a “large” instance — the culture of that Instance will be under extreme stress because they will have a huge (possibly 40 million, grain of salt figure) inflow of users who are not aware of our culture.

It does not matter how strong or vibrant a culture is, if there is a corporation willing to use their power to crush it. This is ultimately why not letting Threads federate is essential. Zucc and his users into the Fediverse do not care about our culture, because they have no need to. They are the dominant culture if they federate.

We have a thriving, flourishing, and organic culture here — free of any corporate malfeasance and wholly owned and controlled by its users.

Threads is the opposite and they are bigger than us. You see the problem now?