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
Even though the “open” option would only allow Threads accounts to post via mention, I am still concerned about bots. I imagine as soon as bot owners find out they can get access to more views via federation, they will spam as many instances as they can get away with.
So I am voting at best “limited” to curtail spam in the feed. I am less concerned about spam in the comments because it will hopefully get downvoted. But who knows, bot accounts may be upvote farming.
I am split between “limited” and “blocked” at the moment. I don’t mind real Threads users being able to subscribe and comment, but bots make me worry.
We can ban bots individually similar to how we do so now from accounts that try to be hosted on lemmy or kbin instances (in that case its mostly seo spammers and usually gets snapped relatively quickly and if they end up spamming the same link we have automods to remove certain links or images that contain links which ive being using currently on a guy making accounts trying to advertise his scam credit cards)