Those that are on Threads are likely not even aware of the rest of the fediverse. I think that when they interact with us they will be. And when Meta decides it’s time to start ads some people will think it’s better over here. Also, some people won’t like Threads using an algorithm on their feed.

The problem with federating with Threads is that then anyone who wants to join the Fediverse will just join Threads (especially the people already using Instagram or Facebook), leaving the success or failure of the Fediverse in the hands of a company whose interest is to attract as many people as possible to its platform, not contribute as an even partner in a federation.

says who? and you could just replace threads with mastodon.social in your statement

From what I found, a lot of the people who join Threads, wouldn’t have even looked into joining the Fediverse in the first place. If anything, Threads is bringing the concept of the Fediverse to more people and some of those people may find that Mastodon and the rest of the Fediverse could be what they prefer, especially if you can still talk with your family and friends on here.

Threads are stuck behind dealing with their investors as we can push the Fediverse with new updates all the time

And that’s how it should be. In my mind the ideal social media is a complete wild west that has it all but also comes with tools that allow users to tailor the experience to their personal liking instead of having someone else do it for them (unless that’s what they want)

There’s also some sort of soft blocking option, which largely hides the instance AIUI but still gives the ability to follow users. This seems like a better option rather than completely defederating.

If Meta want to scrape your data they can do that anyway. All defederation does is stops you looking at their stuff (which, as you say, can be blocked at the user level anyway)

Thx