If Fediversians do not want to interact with people on Threads, they can just ban/block threads.net, no? Why would they not want people to use Activitypub as intended?
I suppose so, but as somebody that just wants to follow a couple of people/organizations I care about and only post every once in a blue moon, this has somewhat discouraged me from treating any given Mastodon server as a stable place to do that.
If I pick the wrong server, it seems like I might become a bargaining chip in some defederation drama any day, not being able to follow or be followed by who I choose (because they happen to be on an "evil" server), and potentially losing my follows and posts because I can't even migrate profiles to "evil" servers after defederation.
Meanwhile, self-hosting Mastodon seems like a hassle, and due to how Activitypub works would also make it somewhat tricky to bootstrap a list of people to follow, since discovery and search are non-global.
Bluesky seems to have solved that better, but can't currently federate with Activitypub servers, so it is yet another island for now.
You're assuming that all interactions are equal and calm and it takes little time to organize your comms; It's wrong.
If I am a trans person, my content will be shared with a company that has demonstrated it doesn't care about harassment, about racism, about large campaigns of hate that end in genocides. Meta doesn't care. Its accounts will see all I do, and will easily harass me. No, it is not possible to block them one by one, it doesn't scale. The only thing that starts to work is to block the whole instance because morons tend to congregate to the same instances (that's how the group effect works best). But even that is not enough because then other instances have access, and other people in my circle haven't blocked the instance so can also be targets, and it never ends.
In short: federation works if each island moderates its people. Meta demonstrably doesn't so it's not going to be a good citizen of the fediverse.
That's more an argument against sharing anything online, because people will always be able to gather info and share it out of band if they are determined. At least the Fediverse has some tools to automate over and commercial social network.
Yes, and that is where self-controlled tools change things. Instead of hoping some third-party for-profit tool who continouously demonstrated they will not take care of oppressed populations, we have the possibility to make what we want, not accept the status quo, secure ourselves. And now people want us to blindly connect to those who are funneling hate in the name of "connectivity". It only shows how individualistic and privileged those people are: as long as something doesn't affect them they don't even see that there is a problem. Not totally new coming from SV white males, but still always the same.
If I pick the wrong server, it seems like I might become a bargaining chip in some defederation drama any day, not being able to follow or be followed by who I choose (because they happen to be on an "evil" server), and potentially losing my follows and posts because I can't even migrate profiles to "evil" servers after defederation.
Meanwhile, self-hosting Mastodon seems like a hassle, and due to how Activitypub works would also make it somewhat tricky to bootstrap a list of people to follow, since discovery and search are non-global.
Bluesky seems to have solved that better, but can't currently federate with Activitypub servers, so it is yet another island for now.