I personally don’t see them as any different than any other large instance and should be treated precisely as such: default federate until they give reason to defederate with them, which should be based on concerns of content/moderation and the like.

Meta is a privacy-hostile company and for that reason I’d certainly not wish to sign up with their service. With that said, the only data they’d be seeing from other instances is what people put out there in the public domain anyway and nothing is stopping them from obtaining that data if they truly wanted it without having to create their own instance to do so.

With that said, I love the fact that individual instance admins have the choice to federate or not and that’s the beauty of the fediverse. There’s going to be some instances that defederate instantly and that’s okay, much like there is going to be instances who take an approach similar to what I think should happen. As a user, I’ll have the choice to use whichever instance suits my philosophy and that’s awesome.

Additionally, to be honest I don’t really think Threads federating is even that relevant for platforms like Lemmy. Threads is a microblogging platform and Lemmy is a link aggregation system. To even post to Lemmy in the first place, federated Threads users will have to explicitly go out of their way to direct their status posts to a Lemmy community. How many people on Threads are realistically going to do that? It’s awkward and most people wouldn’t even know there’s a wider “fediverse” being more used to centralized services like Meta. People already don’t do this particularly often from Mastodon instances which are federated.

The whole thing is a storm in a teacup as far as Lemmy is concerned. It’s a more relevant discussion for Mastodon instances, tbh.