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.
You really think Facebook is gonna poach users from the Fediverse, people who are explicitly here because we don't want to be on Facebook/Twitter/etc? C'mon. This isn't a realistic outcome.
Yes of course I do. Almost everyone here is still using corporate social media while also using fediverse, side by side, I wager you've looked at something corporate today. Why? Because fediverse does not have everything that they want to consume on a day to day basis.
Creating enclosures where that content exists pulls the users over because they can not get it anywhere else.
Let's say you cook a meal, fish and potatoes. You get your fish from the river (publicly available) but the potatoes are only being grown on the corporate land. You are forced to get it from there, so you begrudgingly do because you want your full meal obviously.
Later on they find a way to enclose some of the fish too, and eventually all of it, removing it from the public space. The fediverse still exists, but it's a shell without anything you want on it. You begrudginingly go to the corporation's space for it.
People want their content, and enclosing on public commons by walling off that content is easy to do bit by bit, like thinly slicing a salami until it's all gone. People will even defend against it and pretend that it's not going to happen, like right now.
This analogy doesn't make sense. How are they gonna take what we already have and enclose it away from us? We run the servers, not them.
If they close it off again, we go back to how things are now. Which we're all clearly fine with, because we're already here. Are they gonna hypnotize us on the way out and lead us pied piper style?
So did internet forums. Where are they these days? Oh, they all became subreddits as users moved away to the convenience of reddit.
They will find a way to drown everything through big-data analysis if you give them even the slightest bit of leeway. They must be treated as a completely hostile bad-actor because that is precisely what they are.
Moving from isolated forums to an aggregate community is a huge quality of life change. We're talking about them convincing people who are already on the Fediverse to move to their Fediverse server, which is a side grade, offered to people who almost all hate Facebook already. There's no hook there, and nobody has given me an even slightly plausible pathway that'll convince anybody to move over. There's just vague gesturing and unspoken implications.
Nobody here wants to use their server. We all know how bad they are. We're here because of them. But suddenly a nonspecific siren call is gonna move us all over? It just doesn't make sense. I can think of plausible ways we can gain users from this. I can't find any plausible way to lose users or cause damage to the Fediverse that doesn't involve mind control.
There are thousands of ways to create a hook.
Here's a piss easy one I'll just fire off the cuff, access to the official community for Call of Duty 41 or whatever number they're at these days requires an account, but don't worry we've made a sweet deal for these 3 custom skins you can get!
Whoops, now the entire call of duty community is on their platform, and regularly logs in using their platform because they get content through it. In partnership with Twitch or some shit I don't know.
"Oh since I'm already logged in with this account I'll just use this w/e" happens, and suddenly convenience is causing them to use it more and more and more to just browse the rest of fediverse through it, and over time you find they participate just a little bit less everywhere else, bit by bit, optimised through A/B testing and big-data on Meta's side, until it's all them.
You have to establish a culture of complete hostility to them from the outset or they will find ways. It's really not difficult to think up incentives, nor is it difficult to pay influencers in different audience sectors one by one. Things need to be so unrelentingly hostile to them that even incentives, people they're fans of, and every other method under the sun all becomes uninteresting to people. If you give them even one single inch they will take everything.
Defederation doesn't prevent that from happening at all. They don't need us to do that, and I'm sure they'll absolutely be doing stuff like that. It just doesn't affect our servers in any way.
The idea that they can lure in people currently on the Fediverse just doesn't seem realistic to me. Look at how many people have had an immediate reaction to completely block them; you think this is fertile ground for recruitment, really?
Oh so we should just do absolutely nothing, create absolutely no culture of opposition, and allow it to happen considerably more easily then!
Fuck me it's always americans with this attitude. Completely housebroken people that oppose even the bare minimum of piss easy resistance to corporate control and then wonder why they're the only fucking country without healthcare, basic consumer protections or uhhhh child labour laws.
The idea that there's only two options, doing nothing or complete pre-emptive defederation, is not accurate. If we can't even acknowledge that, I don't think this conversation will be productive.
Those are the options, the third option you're trying to pretend exists is just stringing everyone along until doing it later, only naive idiots would fall for it. It's costing this instance subreddits that were planning to move here as well. Up until now we were on the cusp of moving here and directing users from our subreddits to move here. That has been thrown out the window and we're now looking at others.