I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:
- Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won’t care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
- When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won’t care. They will use Threads because its faster.
This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.
Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.
My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.
I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.
We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
I’m not asking you to trust them, I’m asking how defederating accomplishes anything? They got more users than the entire fediverse in a single day. We are not hurting them by cutting them off, we are merely making the fediverse seem more like a barren hostile place for a bunch of weirdo nerds.
FB is a known source for targeted misinfo campaigns. If I log into those services right now Im pretty much gaurenteed to have misinfo on my landing page.
why federate with that?
The goal is not to hurt meta, but to keep meta from hurting the rest of the federated sites. Like not inviting a known their to the community barbecue because they are known to have stolen tons of food from other community meals. We aren’t keeping them from creating their own dinner or anything by not federating, just keeping them away from ours.
Except in this analogy, Meta hasn’t stolen food before. They run the largest bbq around, and have bought out previous corporate competitor bbqs, and now they’re hosting a giant bbq one way or another, they’re just suggesting you put a gate in the fence so that people can flow back and forth between the small community bbq and their large corporate one.
Is that going to make you nervous since they have such a cool giant bbq that people are inevitably going to want to go there? Yeah, but again, that’s the case regardless of whether or not the gate goes in.
Shilling for Meta is a bad look.
They steal people’s data and don’t follow data privacy laws. They draw people in with unethical business practices, not fair competition like in your example.
People are not worried about people using Meta outside of the fediverse. In your analogy Meta is already easily accessible through the internet in general and people can feel free to use both without needing a special gate.
Does it look like I care whether or not I agree with the hive mind?
My example included them buying out their competition which is not fair, it’s blatantly anti-competitive. Fairness has nothing to do with anything I wrote.
And in my example the gate doesn’t harm the fediverse at all, it just makes it more convenient for users of both bbqs, being my entire point. There is nothing to be lost by federating with Meta.
Defederating means not interacting with the crowd Meta brings in. I have a bunch of other reasons but that’s my main one. And before you suggest blocking, you can’t possibly expect me to block all 10M of their users and the domain block is bugged. I know because I tried.
Besides, this place doesn’t look like much of a barren wasteland since we’re interacting with a bunch of people right now. I don’t mind interacting with only weirdo nerds if they’re nicer people. Quantity doesn’t mean quality after all.
For the people who want to interact with Threads because of family and friends, they should just make an account there. Just don’t let Meta destroy this small part of the internet.