Even more than defederating, it’s in the hands of users. If people were to flood in from somewhere with bad intentions, it would likely be from one or two servers. At that point, just block those servers/communities from your view and continue about your day
At that point, just block those servers/communities from your view and continue about your day
But what if those servers/instances are the ones which has quality communities in it and what if the users and owners of those communities refuse to migrate to new server/instance? Wouldn’t that be the same case of reddit where the user base is split and the new migrated server/instance needs building again?
DING DING DING. Here’s Facebook’s playbook:
- Create close sourced ActivityPub implementation to federate with mastodon/lemmy and gain users.
- Offer better experience than competition via exclusive features, reliability, more communities, etc.
- Once enough users have been obtained, completely defederate from fediverse.
This is absolutely a bad outcome and I hope the pact prevents this from playing out.
However, I feel kind of ok with losing the subset of users that would accept and use a Facebook implementation of the fediverse. It directly defeats the purpose, regardless of how much better the UI/UX may be, and shows they didn’t understand it in the first place.
Best thing we can hope for is a competitor to appear or something and then have a very split fediverse between instances, hence you cannot defederate without causing major harm