cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/7193618
The “free fediverses” are regions of the fediverse that reject Meta and surveillance capitalism. This post is part of a series looking at strategies to position the free fediverses as an alternative to Threads and “Meta’s fediverses”.
How is Threads related to freedom? At best you can call these communities the “Threads-free” Fediverse.
I guess naming things become more complicated when you also include things like Foursquare and eventually Tumblr joining the Fediverse, but the Fediverse is as free in terms of moneys and freedom as it ever was. In fact, there’s a reason the"no big companies allowed" software licenses aren’t considered to be free software.
If I’m not free to join the Fediverse from the server of my choice, whether that’s mastodon.social or threads.net, is the Fediverse truly free?
Joining the fediverse is just a matter of using a platform that implements ActivityPub (the protocol that lets servers communicate with each other. If Threads implements ActivityPub, it’s part of the fediverse, and the people on Threads can interact without any instance that chooses to federate.
However, instances don’t have to federate with Threads. That’s part of the freedom of the fediverse. If an instance admin decides that they don’t want to deal with an influx of hate, don’t want most of the content their uses see to be from Meta, or just don’t want to federate with a for-profit company that has an awful track record, they should be able to defederate. If a user of that instance really wants to see Threads content, they should be able to move to an instance that lets them, but defederation doesn’t make the fediverse or ActivityPub less free.
Of course, admins are free to federate, defederate, and ban as they like.
I just think tying definitions like “free” to specific instances is silly. There is no inherent freedom in blocking specific instances. Different terms like “non-commercial” or “tracking-free” would be much better descriptions of these corpo-defederating instances than “the free Fediverse”.