Defederating won’t do any harm to artists, everyone here will remain here, threads will just be a replacement for twitter and nothing will change. Creating a “walled off garden” as you say is actually a protection. We’re excluding the well known threat that is the Zuck. But we’re not excluding any users, anyone can join lemmy/mastodon… Would you partner up with a country run by nazis, even though the people in the country are the first victims ? No because you know their goals are not compatible with yours (I hope), and you know it will only benefit the nazi leaders and not the people anyway. If we just wait and see, it will probably be to late to act, big corporations are the best at fooling people (otherwise they couldn’t have become so powerful)
“You may one day end up leaving threads” … Do you really expect meta to be ok with that ? It would go against their plan of world domination. Their whole business works by getting people addicted and unable to leave. They use all kinds of manipulation, even at the detriment of the quality of their services. You can’t trust whatever they say, it’s just corpo bullshit as always. Whatever they do, the question is never “what’s in it for users”, but “what’s in it for meta” and “what will it cost to not only users, but anyone that might be impacted”. Any big corpo want only their own good, at the detriment of any other, they never do anything for anyone unless it eventually benefits them more, bonus points if it harms the other, because they want to crush any competition. And meta doesn’t care about its users, depending on how you chose to view it, they are either just consumers being preyed upon, or actually the products, whose personal data is sold for a profit.