Asynchronously talking to people? Not really. Or, I should say - not any where I’m able to contact those people.

While I have some of their phone numbers, I don’t have all of them - and they’re not likely to text me pictures of their new baby.

While I know a couple on Discord, that’s far less than the number of people I know.

I don’t think I know any of their email addresses. And this isn’t the early 2000s where email chains are a thing anyway.

It’s nice to be able to see what old friends are doing. I haven’t talked to some of these people for years. A lot of them came from my time working at Disneyland; sometimes we were close friends; other times we just traded a couple shifts. Still others were just times we spent closing together, chatting about nothing and everything. I treasure their interactions and I want to see how they’re doing - but I don’t want to directly use Facebook.

Threads gives me the ability to check in on them from right here on Kbin. I don’t need to leave this site. I don’t need to give my info to Zuck. I just shoot them a follow, maybe send a message if they have to manually accept follow requests. I don’t want Kbin to defederate because it’ll take that from me for no good reason. (As I’ve stated elsewhere, the fedipact is self-defeating and we should fight at the “extend” stage, not the “embrace” one.)

I don’t want to enter Facebook’s walled garden, and right now the power of the fediverse is that I don’t have to. The fedipact wants to change that - in their ideal world, I would have to. They won’t stop Facebook, but they would be a pain in the ass for everyone who disagrees with their approach (again - fight “extend”, not “embrace!”!), and there’s a good chance their short-sightedness will destroy the fediverse.

But today, the fediverse is a collection of open websites. If Facebook wanted data collection they could just set up their own private instance with some innocent name and nobody would be any the wiser. They have nothing to gain from me interacting with someone on the fediverse; even if that someone is using their site, that person will likely be using their site regardless.

It really doesn’t make any sense to enforce this stupid restriction of “defederate anyone who federates with Meta”. There’s nothing for anyone to gain, and a lot to lose. That’s the main thing I have issues with. (I also don’t think Kbin should defederate from Threads to begin with because it’s meant to cast a wide net. You can make your own instance with tighter moderation if that’s what you want - see Beehaw - or you can block the Threads domain. They’re only on the “microblog” tab anyway unless they’re replying to something they follow here.)