Tangled Threads

Erin Kissane recently posted an excellent writeup about the coming integration of Threads into the Mastdon/ActivityPub/Fediverse world. It is recommended reading for anyone who cares even slightly about the state of the Internet, and especially any server admins and moderators on Mastodon et al. I agree with most of it, although there is one important point on which I think we differ slightly. I want to expand on that here.

Before I continue, full disclosure: I am a moderator (but not admin) on phpc.social, the Mastodon server for anyone even tangentially related to or interested in the PHP programming language or its community. However, this post is my own and has not been endorsed by the other moderators (though I know from conversation at least some of them agree with the general gist). This is not a policy statement from phpc.social, but a recommendation from me.

The problem

Erin's points, if I may summarize for the point of this response, largely boil down to:

1. Meta is a fundamentally and irredeemably immoral company.
2. Meta happily hosts irredeemably immoral and evil people, as long as it makes them profit.
3. Just allowing Threads users to connect to Mastodon users helps provide Meta with value, if only in telemetry on who talks to whom (which they can then sell to advertisers).
4. The current tools for dealing with Threads are not great.
5. There are no easy answers.

As Erin notes, some server admins have taken to proactively blocking Threads from their servers. Individual users can also block a domain, but it only sometimes works. Some think it's a great thing for the Fediverse to have the 800 lb gorilla of social media connecting to the Fediverse, others are afraid of being sat on.

I fully agree with her about the threat that Meta poses, both to the Fediverse and to the world at large. However, I do not agree that hard-blocking Threads is the way to go. In fact, that would be the worst possible option.

The state of play

Let's start with a few observations.

As of December 2023, Threads has 141 million users. As of August, it had 10.3 million active daily users.

As of December 2023, Mastodon has around 8 million users. Its daily active users is around 1.7 million.

No matter how you slice it, Threads already dwarfs Mastodon by a massive degree. Mastodon is a small fry, and the increased network effect potential of connecting Threads and Mastodon... helps Mastodon more than Threads. (It can help Threads in more nefarious ways through telemetry, but that's a different matter.)

Defederating Threads is effectively a boycott. How effective are boycotts? Maybe 1% of the time? They are most effective when they threaten reputation, not revenue. Well, Meta has no reputation to begin with, and are too big to avoid. Boycotting Meta is guaranteed to accomplish... exactly nothing. (I say this as someone who does not and has never had a Facebook, Instagram, or Whatsapp account. Yes, I've been boycotting them. You see how much that has accomplished.)

What do we do?

So does that mean we totally should welcome Threads in? Not quite. Due to Meta's laughably pathetic stance on content moderation, a substantial portion of those 10.3 million active users are openly racist, transphobic, sexist fascists. Giving them access to 1.7 million new targets (who for historical reasons tend to skew toward all the groups the fascists love to attack) is... not great.

However, that also means giving our 1.7 million users access to 10 million new potential followers/friends/audience members. That's not nothing, and especially for indie artists that rely on social media to promote themselves, that's "willing to stay on Mastodon at all" levels of massive.

Fortunately, it doesn't have to be an either/or. This is what is unique and special about the Fedi/Mastoverse: Individual server mods can aggressively police not just their own users, not just other servers, but users from other servers.

What we want in the world is "Threads minus the Nazis." That would be a good thing for humanity. What we want to allow to connect to Mastodon, to our servers, is "Threads users, but not the Nazis."

Most well-behaved servers help each other out by policing their own users to kick out the racists, misogynists, disinformation spreaders, and fascists. If a server doesn't do a good enough job of that, servers can defederate; although some admins have been almost comically over-aggressive on that front rather than engaging to improve matters. The problem is that we know with certainty that Threads will not be well-behaved, but they also represent (or will soon represent) the largest ActivityPub server by an order of magnitude. If you struggle with defederating mastodon.social due to its weak moderation because of its size, Threads has the same problem but much larger.

Unfortunately, the rules really are different for the too-big-to-fail. Defederating Gab or Truth Social can be effective. Threads is a different beast and requires a different response.

If we cannot expect Meta to create Threads-minus-Nazis, we'll have to do it ourselves. That means allowing Threads to federate with our servers... and then aggressively, proactively banning individual misbehaving Threaders so they don't have access to our users. If you run a Mastodon server and don't proactively block LibsOfTikTok on sight, that's just irresponsible.

Yes, this will be a lot of work for mods. As a long-time moderator of numerous fora, I have to say... tough. This is what we signed up for: To protect our users. No one said it would be simple or easy. But that is our responsibility.

So why go to all that work?

Meta isn't integrating with ActivityPub out of the goodness of their heart. I don't believe Zuckerberg's protestations that he's always believed in decentralization for a second. (Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.) However, allowing users an off-ramp is necessary to avoid antitrust issues, now that governments (mainly in Europe where they still have a functional government) are finally, finally starting to question Meta's practices.

But we can make use of that off-ramp to encourage users to migrate from Threads, which has fascists on it, to another ActivityPub server, where the fascists are blocked. They can do so without cutting off their non-fascist friends on Threads. That's the secret weapon. That's our only secret weapon: A safe off-ramp from one server to another. The process is not as clean as it could be, but... that's a technical problem we can fix.

The purpose of different federated servers isn't really for topic-centric discussion. That's always been a pointless distinction. Federated servers let you shop around for a moderator team you like. That's the real value. We have an opportunity to let Threads users shop around for new moderators without losing their friends.

And that is super important. One of the main reasons people stay in cults is because the cult becomes their only source of social support, and leaving becomes an all-or-nothing proposition that makes it nearly impossible to transition out.

Having a new social network that accepts them that they can transition to safely is how people are able to leave cults.

Having a new social network that has fewer Nazis that they can transition to safely without losing their non-fascist friends is how people can leave Threads.

We can make that off-ramp into an off-expressway. And we do it by very aggressively following the Mastodon Server Covenant:

Active moderation against racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia Users must have the confidence that they are joining a safe space, free from white supremacy, anti-semitism and transphobia of other platforms.

If we don't allow our users to talk to Threads (if they want to), we all but guarantee that Mastodon remains a footnote in the social media landscape and the promise of a decentralized, federated Internet moves even further away.

Sounds risky

It is! I won't deny that. This is a lot of work for a questionable payoff, and one that will almost certainly be only partially successful at best. But it's the best option we have.

Refusing to engage with Threads only helps Threads. They can turn around to regulators and say "see, we tried to enable federation, but none of our users are taking advantage of it, so you can't hold us accountable." No one wins in that outcome, other than Meta. That's how network effects work.

Of course, this will necessarily entail growing the population of the Fediverse, which has already gotten a lot of people upset. A lot of Mastodon old-timers miss their small, out of the way pub, from before the crowds arrived and ruined the vibe.

I get it. Really, I do. I've been on both sides of that process many times. Eternal September is a bitch. But every community either goes through Eternal September or dies. There are no other options. The little underground venue by the tracks is already gone. Trying to keep Mastodon small, tone policing people from Threads or Twitter until they leave, only hurts Mastodon. (This has already happened, of course. Black Twitter kept trying to migrate to Mastodon and got shut down hard by the "I'm not racist but" crowd, so they ended up on BlueSky instead. This is not a win. This is a massive loss.)

Yes, this will include cultural evolution. That will happen regardless. We'd best be prepared for it.

If boycotts and passive action don't work, and we know they don't, that leaves only active action. Yes, I am suggesting that we declare war on Threads, not by blocking them but by actively trying to bleed users off of Threads and onto other Mastodon servers, by making Mastodon the "Threads minus the Nazis" platform.

It's a long-shot. I fully agree. It may be unsuccessful. But we already know that every other strategy is unsuccessful.

Let Threads federate. Aggressively block the Nazis. Be the moderators, stewards, and guardians that Meta will never be.

And if it ultimately fails, we can always block Threads in the future with a few button clicks.