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@aral @eatyourglory I’m not sure if I agree completely with this statement.

Defederating Gab, poa.st, cum.salon or RapeMeat was really a no-brainer.

Those were instances created by trolls/fascists/homophobic/misogynist admins, and specifically dedicated to people who share the same ideas and the same ways of treating others.

There’s literally no doubt of the ideology of a person who joins one of those instances: if you join Gab or poa.st, then it’s quite easy to identify your ideas as well.

Can we say the same about Threads? Can we say that everybody there is a transphobic, or a Nazi, or a troll? Can we say that the admins explicitly embrace and actively promote these ideologies?

When you have an instance with millions of accounts, you’re always statistically likely to get jerks. The questions that admins have to ask before defederating are:

1. Are jerks a clear majority there?

2. Are the failures at moderation due to the website administration actively promoting jerks (like it’s the case for Musk’s shithole), or are they due to the challenges of scaling up moderation, or to bars that are just set higher than many Fediverse admins?

3. If we defederate it, what are the risks of cutting out a lot of useful traffic (like institutional accounts, or harmless accounts that are followed by many users on our instances)? In other words, does the signal/noise ratio justify sacrificing the signal in order to protect users from the noise?

4. What are our thoughts about striking a balance between protecting our users from abuse vs. giving them a chance to connect to whoever they want to?

I have the impression that for Threads the response to these questions is negative, at least for now.

Of course, I’m monitoring the situation, and I’m ready to pull the drawbridge at the first signs that Threads has a negative net added value for the Fediverse.

But that doesn’t seem the case for now IMHO (I actually see a lot of nice/decent people on Threads that are genuinely curious about the Fediverse), and I’m not sure if I would handpick a few cases of moderation failures to make an argument in favour of defederation (rather than individual blocks/bans/mutes).