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.
That's not an ethical argument. That's a heuristic based on an ad hominem. It's not that I disagree that they have a history of unethical behaviour but that doesn't mean every act they perform is tainted with being unethical. You have to make the actual argument.
It's not just one behavior, it's a continuous pattern of behavior. If you want to give them a clean slate in every new instance, that's your choice. At some point it's the scorpion and the frog. Whether you consider it an ethical argument or not, it's basic common sense that Meta's pattern of behavior will continue absent any evidence to the contrary.
And ad hominem is an argument against a person, not a company. My argument is citing their past behavior which would not be an ad hominem argument even if I'd cited Zuckerberg specifically. "Because Zuck is greedy." would be ad hominem.
Whether or not an action is ethical should be completely independent of who is doing it, all else being equal. That's not an ethical argument and so it doesn't answer the specific question I am asking.