The mainstream ARE the crazies now, though. The outliers, and only some of the outliers, are sensible, smart people.

This is not the case in places outside the US.

Up to 70 million as of a day ago https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-07/meta-s-threads-has-70-million-signups-surprising-zuckerberg

I’m not concerned how many of these are real users - all the shills, the bots, are even worse than real users as they will just be spewing their propaganda around as much as possible.

Adding ONE million users overnight to the fediverse would be disruptive enough, 10x the biggest day from the influx from reddit. We’re looking at orders of magnitude more than that.

I don’t agree with this notion of “facebook content” vs “fediverse” content or anything like that. Content is just content, it’s links, it’s media, whatever. It’s not “facebook shit” any more than reddit shit or lemmy shit. Content is a by-product of the users, so who/what the userbase is is extremely important - and that is why how it is marketed, who it appeals to and so forth, and the relative scale. thousands of lemmy users being drowned out by millions of Threads users, who are a different demographic, have different goals for the platform, and so forth, is the real issue.

You acknowledge that you have moved on from platforms when facebook/meta have got involved, and you’re welcome to take your decisions on this, but it runs into problems in a federated environment where the goal is to increase interoperability by default.

Don’t get me wrong, I think our goals are the same, to have an environment where people can talk and share links that is relatively exclusive / for like-minded people. I just don’t think the angle of facebook/not facebook is the right one (tbh I would go further - I would not integrate, but not because of the provenance/company, but because of the users’ expectations coming over from Threads)

It’s not about Zuckerberg, it’s about the userbase. With something that grew to 30 million users literally overnight, it’s impossible to determine what it will be like, and how it will mesh with the existing fediverse content/users.

With something this scale, it only makes sense to secure and observe - pre-emptively block, watch the content, maybe even poll the users on what should be done. There is nothing to be lost this way, it’s only a cautious approach towards a potential later link.

What could be lost is the Threads community overwhelms the lemmy community before there is a chance to react (it is 1000x bigger, after all). It makes sense to be cautious, here.

This isn’t inconveniencing anyone, any user can make an account on Threads as well and use both right now.