Hiding threads is a recently added feature in the wefwef client, and I agree that it should be added to lemmy-ui. I think this would be the relevant issue: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/384
bilb
joined 2 years ago
I think people should use the tool that best enables them to accomplish their goals. Often that's some FOSS tool, but just as often it's not.
I don't think that I will
If you think the aforementioned celebrities/influencers/news orgs/etc. are going to choose the fediverse instead of Threads or (I think more likely) BlueSky, that might make sense. I don't see that happening though. What might instead happen is something like this:
Potential fediverse user: "I heard that Facebook's new twitter competitor can work with these existing sites. So I can make an account on one of those and follow Celebrity X and Politician Y without making a Meta account."
Potential fediverse admin: "Well yeah, but you can't follow them from my instance. Or any of these other instances. You see, back in the 90s there was this concept called embrace, extend extinguish..."
No longer a potential fediverse user: "Oh, I guess I'll just make a Meta/Bluesky account instead then."
Right, getting a Linux phone to work well still hasn't been achieved, let alone on modular hardware!
But that's already true for Twitter.
For what it's worth, I agree with your reading, and nobody has described what I consider to be a plausible scenario for how exactly "embrace, extend, extinguish" would actually work here.
I don't think Meta should be given the benefit of the doubt or anything and people may have differing opinions about the likely user base for Threads, but I don't think this is any real concern to the fediverse in general.
I'm actually kinda waiting a few releases to start promoting my instance anywhere, letting some other brave instance admins work the kinks out a bit first.
Kids today have no idea how good they have it with USB!
It's difficult to predict what will happen, but that's my hope as well. I'm going to wait and see what happens with threads federation before making any decisions.