this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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I'm baffled by the trend in recent years of everyone insisting that they need to be in control of every byte of data that they deliberately publish onto the open medium of the Internet.
I mean, I'm not really baffled. I understand that people see that their data might be worth pennies and they want those pennies to be their pennies, darnit. I mean I'm dismayed by it.
If Meta's going to be supporting ActivityPub, then yay, IMO. If you don't want Meta's servers to see your data then stop posting it on an open protocol whose purpose is to show it to Meta's servers.
Look, I understand your opinion and I respect it, but I simply do not trust Meta. They are a business, and they are always going to do what is best for their business. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with that - all businesses are in the business of staying in business - but I think their track record makes them an untrustworthy actor in regards to the fediverse; they're a big tech company joining a small (and I would argue obscure) ensemble of social networks.
Of course, I could be totally wrong and this could be a total boon for Activity Pub, kbin, mastodon, and the wider fediverse. I just think that the opposite is more likely.
And if Meta tries to pull some sort of destructive shenanigans, sure, then defederate from them. Not because they're Meta, but because they're pulling destructive shenanigans. There's already plenty of instances that get defederated for that sort of thing.
That's not what I'm annoyed about here, though. I'm annoyed by all the people who have come to the Fediverse claiming that it's because it's open and free and all that, and then when some company that they have a particular personal dislike for comes along and wants to participate in the protocol exactly as intended they go "but not like that!"
If some random instance like lemmy.ca (name picked randomly) was to find itself in financial difficulty keeping the lights on and was to strike some kind of deal with an advertiser to put banner ads on their site, would there be a similar enormous hue and cry about it? Maybe users on lemmy.ca who have to actually deal with the advertising might raise a ruckus, but over here on kbin.social it wouldn't affect me in the slightest.
In principle, I agree.
My fear is that the fediverse has no big hitter that can compete with Meta’s resources. The closest thing would be Mastodon.social, and they are still tiny compared to the two-billion instagram users Meta is gonna advertise Threads to and the 390 million ~~Twitter~~ X users that they are trying to poach.
I think Meta will play nice in the beginning, but eventually (perhaps even quickly) will gain a much larger userbase than everyone else. From there, it is only a matter of time before their users create more communities and content than everyone else.
Eventually, anyone who is federated with Threads is going to get accustomed to seeing and enjoying Threads content (why wouldn’t they? It’s from people.) That is where I fear Meta will start to flex their muscles because at the end of the day their business model is based on selling user data to advertisers; having users being able to interact from other platforms doesn’t really fit into that as well as having everyone be on your platform.
Obviously, I don’t have a crystal ball and all of this is theoretical, but I can see something like this happening where people start to abandon smaller platforms for Threads because their preferred platform got defederated.