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 feel like this will just hurt us more then help.
I don’t see why this would hurt us. But even if it did, I would rather take the blow than associate with Big Tech again.
Meta willingly under-moderated across large swaths of east Asia and Africa, leading to unchecked rumors and tangible acts of genocide. Zuckerberg has compared himself to Augustus Caesar.
I think it’s acceptable to cut off a wildfire before it spreads.
Gotta love the fact Meta contributed to how my country got a murderer and the son of a dictator as presidents. Real great and trustworthy company there /s
I’m not asking you to trust them, I’m asking how defederating accomplishes anything? They got more users than the entire fediverse in a single day. We are not hurting them by cutting them off, we are merely making the fediverse seem more like a barren hostile place for a bunch of weirdo nerds.
Defederating means not interacting with the crowd Meta brings in. I have a bunch of other reasons but that’s my main one. And before you suggest blocking, you can’t possibly expect me to block all 10M of their users and the domain block is bugged. I know because I tried.
Besides, this place doesn’t look like much of a barren wasteland since we’re interacting with a bunch of people right now. I don’t mind interacting with only weirdo nerds if they’re nicer people. Quantity doesn’t mean quality after all.
For the people who want to interact with Threads because of family and friends, they should just make an account there. Just don’t let Meta destroy this small part of the internet.
The goal is not to hurt meta, but to keep meta from hurting the rest of the federated sites. Like not inviting a known their to the community barbecue because they are known to have stolen tons of food from other community meals. We aren’t keeping them from creating their own dinner or anything by not federating, just keeping them away from ours.
Except in this analogy, Meta hasn’t stolen food before. They run the largest bbq around, and have bought out previous corporate competitor bbqs, and now they’re hosting a giant bbq one way or another, they’re just suggesting you put a gate in the fence so that people can flow back and forth between the small community bbq and their large corporate one.
Is that going to make you nervous since they have such a cool giant bbq that people are inevitably going to want to go there? Yeah, but again, that’s the case regardless of whether or not the gate goes in.
Shilling for Meta is a bad look.
They steal people’s data and don’t follow data privacy laws. They draw people in with unethical business practices, not fair competition like in your example.
People are not worried about people using Meta outside of the fediverse. In your analogy Meta is already easily accessible through the internet in general and people can feel free to use both without needing a special gate.
Does it look like I care whether or not I agree with the hive mind?
My example included them buying out their competition which is not fair, it’s blatantly anti-competitive. Fairness has nothing to do with anything I wrote.
And in my example the gate doesn’t harm the fediverse at all, it just makes it more convenient for users of both bbqs, being my entire point. There is nothing to be lost by federating with Meta.
FB is a known source for targeted misinfo campaigns. If I log into those services right now Im pretty much gaurenteed to have misinfo on my landing page.
why federate with that?
Lemmy is run by a bunch of tankies and the entire fediverse is under-moderated.
Cutting off a ton of users and content from the fediverse is stupid and everyone in here just keeps coming up with vague generalities because they’re scared of Meta rather than have actually thought through what will happen and be able to articulate any actual harms.
i’ll take those “tankies” over completely unaccountable thiel’s buddies any day. actual tankies seem to be contained to lemmygrad where they don’t bother anyone outside of their instance
“Boo hoo tankies bad, but big corpo run by billionaires who spread misinformation and intentionally act to topple legitimate governments in favor of their fascist agenda are akshually good”
Arguing with people like you (corporate shill) is a waste of time, so I’d rather have fun instead.
The reactions you are seeing are based off of Metas history. We will see how it works out.
People have articulated all kinds of actual harms, including two possibilities in the OP, but frankly they’re irrelevant.
We know what Meta’s goals are, and we know they have absolutely no moral standards whatsoever. Exactly how they try to accomplish those goals doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t give them the opportunity to try anything.
We should be scared of Meta, and we should keep them as far away as possible. Anything else is reckless and stupid at best.
No, they didn’t. The harm listed was that Meta will make a shinier platform that will syphon away users, that is happening regardless and is not a harm that is a result of federation, it’s a harm that’s a result of meta having more money to build a better platform.
There goal is to launch a twitter competitor with a lot of users and make money off advertising. Nothing about that conflicts with the fediverse.
Like I said, this thread is filled with a bunch of people shaking in their boots about the company who must not be named rather than actually providing sober rational assessment of what’s likely to happen.
Yeah, you think they give a shit about the fediverse? They’re using ActivityPub because it’s easier for them. They’re not going to want to EEE us, because there’s not enough of us to matter to them.
It’s not easier for them, and once there’s enough people to matter then it’s too late to kill it. The fediverse is growing, and they want to stop that before the fediverse is big enough to matter.
Yes, it is. Read this: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
They can do that without integrating with the fediverse. The reason they’re going to integrate with the fediverse is to embrace, extend, and extinguish.
Yeah, I’ve read that, and it’s not an example of a corporation killing a decentralized network through federation, it’s just a normal example of a corporation killing a decentralized network by having more money to make a better app.
XMPP did not die because Google used that protocol, it died because people preferred using Google Talk over any of the XMPP apps. That would be the case regardless of whether Google used XMPP or not.
How is that any different from what we have now?
Threads has launched, but has federation disabled. So right now Threads is a standalone system, and it and the Fediverse cannot intercommunicate.
If Threads later adds in federation but all the of the Fediverse blocks them, we’re in exactly the situation that exists right this minute. And that doesn’t seem to be hurting the Fediverse at all.
Do you really want the Instagram crowd to interact with us…?
At least there would be people and content to interact with.
Based on your posts so far my friend, its becoming clearer why you think there’s no one to interact with.
Growth at any cost is the mindset that not only ruins anything good for profit, it is also the exact issue we are facing now in real life with the right gaining traction in many liberal and multicultural democracies.
Because everyone is being let in, without a second thought on if they even should be there, we now have massive social issues with not at all integrated subcultures in Europe that embrace values diametrically opposed to our tolerant and pluralist societies, in turn empowering the right to ruin any progress made in an effort to throw out the brown people again.
The right question to ask is not “can we accept this new member to our society?”, the right question is “should we accept this new member into our society based on their beliefs and values, based on if they can contribute anything to the existing society?”
And to return to the matter at hand, this is what the fediverse is supposed to be. A bunch of communities and little realms, each with their own rules and interests but united in their belief that self determination and democratic structures make for a better and more fair internet. And then we have the meta intruder we are about to welcome with open arms, without any rules or expectations of him to adopt our values and culture, so they bring their own, corporate, centralized culture and use their money to brute force that culture into every place of importance.
It is not racist or intolerant of societies to expect newcomers to assimilate, and ignoring that fact brought us a re emerging right.
And it is not fearmongering or small minded to be extremely sceptical of Facebook trying to establish themselves in the fediverse, they are literally the OG data and privacy violating corporation, they invented echo chambers and connecting extremists. There is zero value to the fediverse in welcoming meta. The only one who wins if that happens is meta.
Exactly. Facebook is a known bad actor. There is absolutely no reason to believe their intentions are anything but evil. Pretending Threads is just another instance is both naive and dangerous. It is a cancer. If allowed to federate, it will metastacize.
Facebook is not evil, advertising is.
The people at Facebook aren’t sitting there plotting to make the world worse, they’re just sitting there figuring out how to make the numbers go up and since they’re an advertising driven business, that means engagement metrics, which leads to the vast majority of their resultant evil. The advertising / engagement driven business model is what is actually evil and what could actually be addressed by legislators.
Well said.