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With today's news that Meta is getting rid of fact checkers and changing its policies to allow more hate speech directed at trans and queer people, seems like a good time to resurface these detailed instructions on how to block Threads.

privacy.thenexus.today/how-to-

If you want even more protection, your best bet is to move to an instance that's blocking threads -- see fedipact.veganism.social to check the status of your instance. And I agree with @kissane's recommendation in the excellent Untangling Threads

"I think the nearest thing to reasonably sturdy protection for people on fedi who have good reason to worry about the risk surface Threads federation opens up is probably to either…

  • block Threads and post followers-only or or local-only, for fedi services that support it, or
  • operate from a server that federates only with servers that also refuse to federate with Threads—which is a system already controversial within the fediverse because allowlists are less technically open than denylists."


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The Nexus of Privacy

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It's worth highlighting how much organizing there's been here in the 18+ months since Meta first announced their plans to embrace, extend, and exploit the Fediverse.

@jat23's Closing the Door to Remain Open: The Politics of Openness and the Practices of Strategic Closure in the Fediverse is a great overview.

And from June 2023, the "Why the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact is good strategy for people who want the fediverse to be an alternative to surveillance capitalism" section of Should the Fediverse welcome its new surveillance-capitalism overlords? Opinions differ! talks about the importance of the .


Also, the changes Meta is making to Facebook's feed algorithm "will make it more likely to recommend extreme and polarizing content".

Here's an excellent Bluesky thread on that from Laura Edelson (Chief Technologist at the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice):

bsky.app/profile/whiskeyocelot

An excerpt:

"The return to an algorithm that drives more politics and more extreme rabbit holes is a return the Facebook of 2016-2020. This has some business upsides, by both cutting costs and juicing user engagement (aka, ad revenues). But it has very, very serious downsides for users and for communities.

Because the hate speech policies and the algorithmic changes that were rolled back this week were developed in response to very real offline violence, including genocide in Myanmar, that were fomented on Facebook. This is a plan to go back to that algorithm and those policies."

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