Am I the only one a bit confused as to what Threads has to do with Lemmy, beyond them both using ActivityPub…? Like, these are completely different kinds of websites, Lemmy is a Reddit clone and Threads is a Twitter clone. What purpose would federation serve?

Seriously lol. These are social networks, what is the point of using this stuff at all if you don’t care about anybody being able to view your posts or interact with you

I won’t defend Meta but I don’t see the advantage of defederating when Threads activates ActivityPub.

By federating, we have access to all the people and content on Threads, removing a major barrier to entry for Mastodon/the fediverse for casual users. And because our accounts aren’t on Meta servers and we don’t need to install the Threads app, we aren’t subjected to the same level of privacy issues, at least not any more than what Meta would get by scraping our posts on the web in general.

I’ve actually noticed a lot less content on my Reddit frontpage. Granted I don’t subscribe to any of the most popular r/all subs, but the tech and niche interest subreddits were the only reason I ever went to Reddit in the first place.

I genuinely can’t bear to use the Reddit iOS app for more than like five minutes so I tend to just skim and close the app. I wonder if a lot of other Apollo/3PA users are feeling the same way and it’s caused a drop in engagement as a result.