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.
We have to stick to our guns and keep supporting the small instances.
Admins needs to strike first and defederate from Meta before they do.
What good does that do the small instances? And how does that harm Meta?
All that happens is:
- The small instances won’t get the extra activity that Meta users might bring
- Meta will not get the small amount of existing content on those small instances
That’s more a loss for us.
Ya pretty much double-edge sword
On one hand, Instagram users can bring a ton of content, which “should” be good for the overall website
On the other, it’s Meta lol
If I wanted all of the Instagram content I would be on Instagram. I don’t want all of that content cluttering up another space and overwhelming another space.
I don’t really see how it’d be a loss. The fediverse has existed for a long time alongside big centralized social media, and Threads ostensibly having ActivityPub support doesn’t really change that.
How about you do that once Meta does anything other than run their own instance and help to popularize the concept of the fediverse?
We should be warry of anything big tech embraces. For example, Facebook reportedly uses servers running Linux. For that reason, we should all stop using Linux. Since Facebook has both an ios and an android app, we basically have to stop using our phones. We should shoot ourselves in the foot if there’s a chance we might get to bleed on them /s
