That's a big decision I won't make without community input as it would affect all of us.

If we purely treated it as just another instance with no history then I believe our stance on it would be to allow them, as we are an allow-first type of instance. While there are plenty of people we might not want to interact with, that doesn't mean we should immediately hit that defederate button.

When taking history into account it becomes a whole different story. One may lean towards just saying no without thought.

All of our content (Lemmy/Fediverse) is public by default (at the present time) searchable by anyone and even if I were to block all of the robots and crawlers it wouldn't stop anyone from crawling one of the many other sites where all of that content is shared.

A recent feature being worked on is the private/local only communities. If a new Lemmy instance was created and they only used their local only communities, would we enact the same open first policy when their communities are closed for us to use? Or would we still allow them because they can still interact, view comments, vote and generate content for our communities etc?

What if someone created instances purely for profit? They create an instance corner stone piece of the "market" and then run ads? Or made their instance a subscription only instance where you have to pay per month for access?

What if there are instances right now federating with us and will use the comments and posts you make to create a shit-posting-post or to enhance their classification AI? (Obviously I would be personally annoyed, but we can't stop them)

An analogy of what threads is would be to say threads is a local only fediverse instance like mastodon, with a block on replies. It restricts federation to their users in USA, Canada and Japan and Users cannot see when you comment/reply to their posts and will only see votes. They cannot see your posts either and only allow other fediverse users to follow threads users.

With all of that in mind if we were to continue with our open policy, you would be able to follow threads users and get information from them, but any comments would stay local to the instance that comments on the post (and wouldn't make it back to threads).

While writing up to this point I was going to stay impartial... But I think the lack of two way communication is what tips the scales towards our next instance block. It might be a worthwhile for keeping up-to-date with people who are on threads who don't understand what the fediverse is. But still enabled the feature because it gives their content a "wider reach" so to speak. But in the context of Reddthat and people expressing views and opinions, having one sided communication doesn't match with what we are trying to achieve here.

Tiff

Source(s): https://help.instagram.com/169559812696339/about-threads-and-the-fediverse/

PS: As we have started the discussion I'll leave what I've said for the next week to allow everyone to reply and see what the rest of the community thinks before acting/ blocking them.

Edit1:(30/Mar) PPS: we are currently not federated with them, as no one has bothered to initiate following a threads account