I don’t understand how ActivityPub works that well and I haven’t used Threads so maybe I just doing get it.
But why would we have to worry about defederating Threads when it’s a Twitter clone? It doesn’t have communities and such so I would think it’s not compatible. We’re not federated with Mastodon instances right? This seems like something for Mastodon to worry about. How is a Lemmy instance refusing to federate with Threads relevant?
They certainly could, but using something off the shelf saves development time and costs. Not only did someone else already do the base work, but they are fixing bugs and adding features as an ongoing task. And that all happens free, without Meta spending a dime. Meta only needs to add their customizations.
There’s been plenty of speculation on why they want to federate, which is much less clear. It could be an attempt to get around EU antitrust (etc) laws. It could be an attempt to usurp Mastodon as the primary destination for Twitter refugees. It could be an attempt to slurp up the data from people that refuse to give it to Meta. But this is all just speculation, and it’s unlikely that they will honestly reveal their reasoning.
Are they using an off the shelf ActivityPub implementation (if so, which?) or just implementing the protocol themselves? If it’s the latter, which I expect it is, then implementing the protocol does not save development time or effort. It’s just a set of specifications that they decide to conform to, rather than doing things some other way that may better suit their business goals.