A few days ago, I expressed concern over Meta’s new fact-checking and content moderation policies. When Thread announced its move to the Fediverse over a year ago, we chose not to take preemptive action. Instead, we saw that we had all the tools needed for proportional responses to potential threats to keep our folks safe. And as we stated then, we would treat Threads.net like any other Fediverse server.

For details on Meta’s new content policies see here: https://opentermsarchive.org/en/memos/meta-dampens-hate-speech-policy/

Although we haven’t received any moderation tickets from Threads users, not a single ticket, Meta’s updated content policy changes are, in our view, an action that by itself warrants a response.

Effective Immediately: Limiting Threads at Indieweb.Social At A Server Level

We’re limiting (silencing) Threads at the server level. Here’s what this means:

Limited Visibility: Threads content will no longer be viewable from the federated timeline. Threads.net content would be almost completely hidden from this server - for users who do not already follow Threads users.

Users who do currently follow Threads accounts will not be severed from those existing social relationships, and new users here can still follow Threads accounts should they wish to.

But this will almost completely limit Threads content to anyone not actively seeking Threads content or following Threads users.

This decision prioritizes our community’s well-being and safety. While we value federation and interoperability principles, we’ll always prioritize our users' needs.

Why Limit Instead of Fully Block?

There are no easy answers to this issue, and we understand some servers will choose to not limit and only choose to moderate this purely at a user level, and some servers will fully defederate with Threads accounts.

We respect each of those choices.

Or view: By limiting Threads instead of blocking (yet) we allow individual choice while minimizing the risk of harmful or misleading content spreading to our users and the risk of our moderation team being overloaded.

I empathize with Manton’s perspective: “Even though I’ve blogged about my disagreement with Meta’s new approach to content moderation, I don’t think defederating is the answer. It makes a decision for thousands of users, cutting them off from following Threads accounts, rather than letting each user decide if they want to opt out. It makes the fediverse worse and more disjointed, in my opinion.”

_But the only choice isn’t nothing, versus full defederation. _For now, limiting is to our view the appropriate response to keep our folks safe while taking action at a server level reacting to Meta’s latest content moderation changes.

Proportional Moderation

And at Indieweb social we commit to moderating all individual harmful accounts we see, and interactions with Threads content on our server to those following or encountering Threads content even while Limited.

We’ll continue monitoring the situation closely, and will move to full fediblock if we see:

  • Harassment or Harmful Content: Consistent failure to address harassment, hate speech, or content violating our TOS may lead to defederation.

  • Malicious or Spammy Behavior: Engaging in malicious activities, such as spamming or spreading malware, may result in defederation.

  • Even if we see relatively few issues but enough to cause our moderation team to be overloaded, we would defederate.

A limit of Threads can become a full block of Threads** instantly **should we see the need (limits are revocable while on Mastodon fediblocks are permanent) and we will be continuing to watch this very fluid space.

All this said: Am very open to good faith discussions on this choice in the comments on the post on my Mastodon account.