In the past we said we were going to run a federation poll regarding Threads (activitypub compatible instance created by meta) and now that theyre ramping up federation and we have a new instance coming that would interact with that I decided its time to do so
This poll is only open to people who have an account on programming.dev as it only affects those users (other instances decide federation on their own).
This also only affects us pulling content from them. Them pulling content from us isnt stoppable on our side (and if it is they can still get it through things such as boosts from instances in the middle on the microblog side or by querying the api).
There will be mention of a link aggregator side and a microblog side. The link aggregator side is this site and the microblog side is a new instance being started up where I wanted to get this poll out before I release it publicly.
On the side of Threads they are making interacting using activitypub opt in so the amount of users there would not flood out everything else as people need to explicitly change in their settings that they want to interact with mastodon, etc.
Regardless of whats voted you shouldnt notice any changes on the link aggregator side similar to how mastodon users barely pop up now
This will be pinned in the instance for a couple days to ensure as many people as possible vote. Afterwards ill collect the results and make a post with them here (not pinned)
- Note accounts created after this poll was made cant vote to prevent vote manipulation
To be honest it's hard to decide, I hate facebook/twitter/etc. I don't want to be close to those social networks. I find Lemmy great, small enough to have a decent community and big enough to get content unless you doom scroll 24/7.
But just last week I needed to search for something and I only found the answer in reddit, I even felt weird going back to that place. I'm not sure we got enough members to cover that kind of necessity. And I feel that if we alienate from other places we'll eventually die because of lack of members/content.
If our content gets federated to threads then it just means that google results will point to it first rather than to us, they will probably have better indexing and search features than the fediverse. People will also probably think the content originated on threads too (since that's where they see it and threads could easily obfuscate info like that) instead of who actually made it.
It could increase the short term engagement but in the long run, it will just serve to make threads better.