Based on data from https://fedipact.veganism.social/ it seems that the majority of instances blocks threads.net. I’m sure there’s Lemmy instances with either approach that have slipped through the cracks as the list is a work in progress.
The percentage of users doesn’t correlate to instances as the biggest instance on the Lemmyverse has roughly 3x the users of the second largest, a NSFW instance, 4x the users of the biggest “niché” instance and 5x the users of what I see as the second largest general purpose instance.
I hope not. I know this is controversial but there’s literally no benefit from defederating. People can simply block threads at a personal level if they want.
Even if you do, everything on Lemmy is public so you gain no privacy advantage by blocking it. The only thing you might prevent is a reduction in content quality, but again, if that bothers you just block the instance yourself.
This is a classic kneejerk reaction where people are trying to prevent a hypothetical harm before it has even proven to be a problem.
I can tell you one benefit: Money. Most of my server’s costs come from storing federated content. Federating with threads would likely be expensive.
You should read this. https://erinkissane.com/untangling-threads
By federating your instance to Threads, you are providing more content to Meta for them to place ads next to, supporting a network that allows abuse orgs like Libs of TikTok with limited moderation.
Consider this scenario: LoT sees a post you made on Lemmy. They select you as a random target of hate, as they did hundreds of people at the beginning of this year.
Their followers start going after you, but you don’t know it because you block them. It turns to real life harassment.
This is a real issue, one of many.
As an instance admin it seems incredibly irresponsible to allow my server to spoon feed Meta my users data and activity through federation.
And Meta proved many, many times that they are utterly untrustworthy.
Honestly, even if I agree in principle, the fediverse has exhausted any sympathy from me given that there’s consistent toxicity towards people who don’t “get it”, people who aren’t open-source tech nerds or fediverse evangelists. There’s this constant smugness that the fediverse and its community is better than everything else and it has no problems or the problems that do exist is how the fediverse should work. No, not everyone is like that, but the ones that are make the fediverse experience that much more painful and I’d rather just use Bluesky, even though it’s janky and much more limited in features.
Not even talking about Threads, either. I think this issue is quite prevalent on Lemmy but I remember Technology Connections having this issue on the Mastodon side to the point where he got angry too.