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.
Currently Reddit has significantly more users than Lemmy. Has that stopped people from signing up to Lemmy? Twitter has has significantly more users than Mastodon since forever. Has that stopped people from signing up for Mastodon? Has it killed Mastodon?
The common error I see in all the “Threads will kill the Fediverse” mania is that it assumes the same people who sign up for Threads would have otherwise signed up for Mastodon/Lemmy/Kdin/etc. 99.9% of them probably never would have. They want something that’s easy and just works; and they’re willing to let a company profit off their data to have it.
I don’t think those are good comparisons. The point he is trying to make is that when a user joins Lemmy and sees a two gaming subs, one on Lemmy.world and the other on a meta instance with more subscribers, that user will join the meta sub.
I do not want to see only corporations holding the keys to the majority of communities and if they are allowed in that will be their goal. Meta doesn’t give a shit if the 3dprinting sub has quality content, only that it is profitable for them. Corporations will choose profit over the users every time.
People will say “well if it gets bad or they start becoming bad actors then we can drop them” but that will just set us back to where we are right now. I would rather see us grow slow without corporations than fast with them.
The problem is that this doesn’t change the outcome.
To use your example, if we federate people will join the meta instance, if we don’t federate people won’t even know the lemmy.world instance exists, and even if they do they would still join the meta one if it’s bigger.
I totally agree with the sentiment, but I yet have to understand how not federating can change the outcome
The only way smaller instances can thrive and make a strong federation is by making the average person start to care more about privacy.
But you can’t do that if you can’t reach them in the first place
That’s not what’s going to happen. I really don’t understand why people on Lemmy are so fussed about this, Meta are not building a lemmy instance, they are building a twitter clone. While yes you can access Threads content through Lemmy that doesn’t mean it’s going to affect the Lemmy ecosystem. Mastodon is going to be way more affected than Lemmy ever will be.
Just because they are on the Fediverse doesn’t mean it will make sense to use their services through all other Fediverse platforms and vice versa. Following an entire Lemmy “sub” on threads will be a shitty experience and Threads doesn’t have creation of subs as an option, the only viable equivalent features are user posts.
It’s about threads becoming the fediverse by virtue of their size and resources, and then making changes to the protocols which ultimately lock out the actual fediverse. It will be ‘fediverse, by Meta’ where everything is hosted and run by meta.
And how do you think defederating them will affect that at all?
They can just use their influence and say “here, W3C, add this and that to the protocol”.
How will a small mastodon server with a few thousand users stop that? Defederating them is useless.
Not totally sure, but I don’t think that negotiating with Threads on anything at any point is a winning strategy. They’ll win every time. Kind of a ‘give them an inch they take a mile’ situation in my head.
At least by staying separate the user base will have to make a conscious decision about where they want to spend time instead of letting Meta dictate that for them in the future.
It is harmful either way. Not a great situation for fediverse. I wouldn’t say defed is useless, it clearly does something. Effective? Not sure.
EXACTLY! It only benefits us because it hugely increases the exposure of the fediverse to the outside world so people who ARE interested can merely jump over. It makes the fediverse more interesting for people like me who can “live” here and access the content I want.
two things:
have you considered that if this happens, once the fediverse’s exposure grows it will be thanks to Meta’s entrance, then the people that join the fediverse will do so by Meta’s means (in this case, Threads. But they can make some more after)? Making them the standard way to access the protocol, gradually making other communities less and less relevant.
It makes the fediverse more interesting for people like me who can “live” here and access the content I want.
I’m not trying to be rude by any means, but honestly, if the content you enjoy is on their platforms, just go there and enjoy it. You can be both there and here.
The exposure is still greater than the zero that currently exists. If only 1% see the stuff from the smaller instances and figure out what’s up, they’ll jump. That’s better than the current near 0. There’s not really a scenario where it reduces the activity here any further, only improves it.
