Since Meta (the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) launched Threads as a rival to X/Twitter, there has been a healthy dose of scepticism from the fediverse community about Meta’s intentions, the company’s values and whether Threads joining the fediverse is a good thing or bad thing.
oslo.town is based on Mastodon, so it’s part of the fediverse and our position on Threads thus far was to remain open. On launch, Threads had not joined the fediverse and their implementation of this has been relatively slow. This means there was very little impact on oslo.town.
However, as of the time of writing, there is some form of federation between the two services. Your data moves from our servers to theirs and from theirs to ours. This means latest statements from the company about how they treat their users become more worrisome. The loosening of their moderation policies enables hate speech against the LGBT+ community to thrive – this is unacceptable.
In addition, it is unclear about how Threads would store and use the data it pulls from oslo.town. For example, Threads could soon start to monetise your content on their platform.
This week we used the Announcements feature on Mastodon to ask users of oslo.town if they wanted threads.net to be blocked or kept: of those who voted 92% voted to block threads.net, while 8% voted to keep the connection.
The results of the poll were very clear, so steps have been taken to block threads.net on oslo.town.
As the current admin of oslo.town, I agree with the majority poll result. Blocking Threads is best for us right now, and it matches the ideas behind the fediverse and Mastodon software.
If you have any comments or questions, feel free to reach out via the fediverse to @themayor@oslo.town or email oslo.town@outlook.com