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 assume people who use the fediverse cares in some way about federation, do they not?
It's like going to a community yard sale, except Amazon shows up and starts doing sales with massive discounts. They're Amazon, they're definitely going to be better at pretty much anything, and as the clearly "better" seller, everyone's going there. It's not like it's illegal or anything, users might even get to buy better stuff. But it's not really that much of a yard sale anymore is it? And the work of the people who developed the community just goes to serve Amazon. What's the point of keeping amazon in the yard sale anyway, they're more than capable of maintaining a storefront of their own. People who want to shop at Amazon can just walk through the front door of amazon fresh, it'll always be there. The yard sale maintains it's character and culture by not expecting it's smaller sellers to compete with a behemoth.
I understand your view but no, not everyone here cares about fediverse, honestly this technicalities should be abstracted for the end user. Not everyone is a nerd or have time or passion to care about fediverse, should we abandon them just because we dont like meta? No we should create a platform just as fun and easy to use as centralized platforms with better privacy and no ads.
If we keep doing this very few people will use fediverse just like what happend to matrix and others
A free, open-source, privacy-conscious, human-moderated platform with great usability and easily accessible sounds beautiful. Also, sounds decades away and probably utopic, given the amount of time and resources needed to make all that possible. And when you start focusing on just getting funding to keep growing, well, you end up being Meta.
I really really hope I'm proven wrong as soon as possible
Ding! Online community infrastructure is like leftism. If you don’t do something about accessibility for the masses, all you’re left with is a sad circle-jerk.