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(I’d note that, at least in theory, this would allow Threads to be *more* aggressive than base Facebook in enforcing their ToS, because they could mitigate legal backlash by saying “take your addressbook with you to a fediverse host, not our problem”.)

I’m not sure this is *good* for the fediverse (in this theory, Meta will treat the fediverse as the dumping ground for garbage people) but it’s a lot more plausible as a motive, and overall less bad, than “an entity with 3B MAU wants to suck in the data of 3M MAU”.

@luis_in_brief all the garbage people are already on the fediverse, on gab and truth social. At least there is a natural route for them if they’re deplatformed from Threads?

@cfg true! So maybe it’s not even that big a deal, except reputationally?

@gcampax @cfg @luis_in_brief I suspect a few of them would try to federate amongst themselves only to get into internecine warfare, because that's what that kind of petty idiocy and myopic hatred engenders. In that regard it would be the equivalent of drunken clowns fighting each other.

@luis_in_brief oh I misread initially "be able to take your audience with you to another server." So at that point... what's the difference? Like, if followers of a "deplatformed" person won't follow them from Twitter to Truthsocial for example, are they gonna follow from Threads to Mastodonsocial? And if they don't follow you and your posts get blocked from Threads anyway, you're still effectively gone and separated from your audience, cause if the switching cost for followers is too high...it still will be.

@nromdotcom unclear how they’d finesse that! But you could imagine some client indications that boil down to “hey, this guy violated our terms, continue to follow at your own risk, here we’ve made it easy to unfollow”. They’ve also made it (so far) a purely algorithmic timeline, so perhaps they can say “they are deplatformed and shadowbanned but no my censored”? But again at this point we’re just speculating and I bet they haven’t figured it out either.

@nromdotcom and here they’re … actually doing something like this? https://www.threads.net/t/CuXeFvUJ0yy

@luis_in_brief that's...an interesting choice.

"This user has repeatedly posted false information that...went against our Community Guidelines [but they still have an account and you can follow them]" makes one wonder what the Community Guidelines are even for.

I think there is room for many types of content and conversation that have been getting erased to make corporate social media brand-friendly, so I think it's cool they seem to at least be trying to provide some nuance in their policies, messaging, and user safety tooling.

However, I'm afraid it will just be used to allow the Trumps to stay on the platform so they can make a play for "virtual town square" now that Twitter is fumbling the ball. And "regular folks" will still be unfairly boxed in so they don't scare the advertisers off (once they get around to adding ads).

@nromdotcom yeah, it’s definitely not Good, just …. interesting.

@halfcocked if I were them, I’d promise advertisers never to advertise next to content from third-party fedi hosts. Very easy way to distinguish themselves from Elon’s sewer, and overall always likely to be a small sliver of content even if they become very active federators.