I'm not sure how much faith you can put in those stats. My two instances are both defederated from Meta platforms for example, but I haven't signed the Fedipact. For me, it's not about Meta itself, but because they house hate groups. If they stopped doing that, I'd federate with them
I don't see them removing the hate groups any time soon, but as far as my defederation approach goes, that just makes them like any other hate platform on the fediverse. They get blocked and I move on.
Would it be a good idea to have a more accurate (and therefore higher) number on how many Threads defeds there are?
I'm not sure that it makes much of a difference to anything? It won't change Meta's approach to the fediverse, and the pact tracker will never have accurate numbers because of people like me and people that that defederate without even knowing the pact exists.
I do agree with Ada in broad strokes. The Fedipact is just a petition. Meta doesn't care if you sign it. And it's not binding either—you can sign it and end up changing your mind and federating anyway, or you can defederate without signing it (like Blahaj).
It's still interesting data though. It may not represent every instance's stance on Meta, but it does reflect the stances of those that sign, and suggest that they're more active in the discourse.
You're right on the money with it being about admins and not users, too. Users aren't even allowed to sign it, only mods and admins can.
It's hard to extrapolate too much just from this data, I think.
That said, my read on it: Mastodon is way bigger than any other fedi platform, and with popularity comes outsiders to fedi culture and politics and people who just don't care. Also, a lot of the big instances want to federate because they have more of a growth mindset, so they when they see Meta they just see more potential users.
It's interesting though that Mastodon is the platform that would be most affected by federation. We here on Lemmy don't have great interoperability with the microblog side of the fediverse, so we're less likely to see Threads activity.
We here on Lemmy don’t have great interoperability with the microblog side of the fediverse, so we’re less likely to see Threads activity.
I for one would be fine with just defederating from the entire microblogging world, Fediverse or otherwise. In fact, just cut them out of the internet completely. They are essentially the text equivalent of the sound bite and actively harm public discourse.
That FediDB stats page is confusing. It isn't clear whether they only count instances that have joined Fedipact, or also include instances that have blocked Threads without joining Fedipact. A quick glance at the list suggests the latter. But in that case, there are a bunch of instances missing from the list.
As for admins versus users, here on sh.itjust.works we held a vote among our users. The result was overwhelming: 78% of users voted to preemptively block Threads. https://sh.itjust.works/post/11308397
They began experimentally federating several of their staff accounts. I could read them directly on mastodon. I don't THINK they could read any Mastodon data
Some admin have already / will block Meta but don't see any point of signing the pact.
Some people choose to federate with Threads but are Meta hostile. They federate with the goal of promoting Fedi/FLOSS/privacy/leaving Meta on Threads 🤷
I think the wording is a bit misleading, too. Those users didn't actively commit to #FediPact. They just happen to use an instance where the admins decided to block Meta. Deliberate or not, it is indirect from the user's perspective.
And my opinion is: The whole #FediPact is very unbalanced. While we do care, we also have to remind ourselves that Meta probably don't care at all about -for example- the 40.000 users on Lemmy.