DavidB

The Roanoke colony is not a really fitting comparison (actually there are none, this is literally unprecedented), they were still on Earth. And they vanished because they had no food. And they didn’t vanish into the void. They were welcomed by a native colony nearby. Most integrated into the colony, some traveled to other places, died, or were integrated into other native villages.

If a Mars colony runs out of food, I’m not sure there is a Martian village to welcome them.

This is the right answer.

Collecting profile pics, posts, likes, and so on, is basically what is needed to federate. If they don’t collect that, they can’t display things from other instances.
And guess what our instances will collect the same data from Threads to be able to display stuff from there…