this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
1342 points (94.5% liked)

Fediverse

27910 readers
9 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I really don't understand this logic... There is literally absolute no advantage by not federating with Meta.

Why would users prefer the free Fediverse MORE if it's not federated with the "big and good" Metaverse? If anything it just drives them away into Metas arms, because the non-Meta instances are small and all the stuff is on Meta anyway.

Defederating is just the worst case result, but instantly from the beginning... How does that do any good???

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

thats what ive been saying, atleast use em for a while to get some of the user base to switch over.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Both those things literally happen with 100% certainty and instantly when you defederate...

Meta is not going to go away or fail somehow just because everyone defederates from them!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Most people in this thread have a vastly overestimated opinion of how large the fediverse is, how relevant it is to social media overall, and how much any other social media company actually cares about what's going on here. If every server defederates from Meta, Meta will just shrug and go on with its day, and continue siphoning users off anyway. Probably even faster than before, because there will be no way for fediverse users to see the Threads stuff they want to see. They'll have to explicitly re-home over there. And what are the chances they'll stick around on the fediverse after that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

If people want both things they can easily access both things without needing them to be connected.