I thought I understood lemmy.world's position several months ago was to not federate with Threads. This was the vocal position of many instances. Has this changed?

At a very desperate time in my life I worked for Comcast. Everytime something bad happens to me now I know I deserve it and that it is karma coming back to me.

I don't believe for a second that any of them have good intentions.

theres also https://defed.xyz/

I don't really care about that, but given that defederation with particular instances is a good way to get a feel for what content and instance allows/disallows, it'd be nice to be able to filter instances on https://lemmyverse.net and https://lemmy.fediverse.observer and https://kbin.fediverse.observer by whether an instance is defederated or not with some list of other instances. Like, maybe you want an instance that federates with instances providing pornography (lemmynsfw.com) but not extremist political positions (hexbear.net). Right now, it's a very manual process to check the federation list on many instances.

I'm not sure what the difference is between the two is though, so I'd appreciate if someone would explain.

Looks like to be part of the fedipact you have to sign this: https://fedipact.online/

Even if you aren’t against federating with threads on principle part of the challenge is going to be able to keep up with moderating their entire user base en-masse and being able to afford the cost of federating content from so many users at once.

It’s a burden I doubt a lot of smaller instances can handle.

I mostly agree. The one thing I will say in favour of defederation is hate content. Meta has incredibly lax moderation. People can literally say "this person deserves to be killed", or even "I would absolutely murder this person if I came across them" and Meta will be like "yeah we understand this may be disappointing to you, but we're gonna allow that to stay" if you report it.

Yes, by being a bigger instance with piss poor moderation. We'd be overrun with trolls and spammers

they could develop new features but intentionally implement them in a way that they are not compatible with other services. they could put all the other instances they federate with on rolling blackouts so that it seems like they are down when in fact it's just them cutting the connection. doing just these two things with purpose could make it look like Facebook has the most advanced and stable instance. in addition, as you mentioned, it would also have the biggest populace. there would be pressure to abandon other instances to join that instance to stay in touch.