I agree with you.
Instances can defederate from meta at any point they choose, should it become necessary in the future. Until then, it is a huge boon to the more decentralized parts of the fediverse to get content from where all the “normies” are, as well as giving more visibility to non-meta instances and giving said normies a road to the less data-hungry parts of the network.
Reading material: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
honestly, i think only half-accepting them would be beneficial. it gives meta users a taste of the fediverse but locks them out of a whole bunch of cool stuff that they could have, if they just make an account on one of the instances that they already know because it’s in the half that does federate. we just need to ensure we never repeat xmpp’s mistake: meta users should never be a majority.
i’ll have to discuss this with our admin team, but my initial plan is to defederate meta if usage by them hits 25%. if a critical mass of the fediverse does that, in the worst case we’ll split off from them before taking damage, and in the best case we’ll actively siphon away their user base. (and if any other tech giant enters the fray, we’ll just have to include them in the 25% quota as well.)
update: we discussed the topic and went for an immediate defederation
Plus, the more entwined threads is with the rest of the fediverse, the harder it’ll be for them to break off. Users will be following Mastodon accounts and posting in Lemmy communities and if Meta does something to break that, they’re the ones that’ll get the backlash, not the fediverse. We’ll just continue along as normal.
it is a huge boon to the more decentralized parts of the fediverse to get content from where all the “normies” are
This is something I can’t understand. There’s obviously no profit motive to push fediverse to everyone, and most content is dogshit.
Can you explain why you find either to be preferable?
