I think most of us who moved here from Reddit are enjoying our time here on kbin.social. We've left a lot of the riff-raff behind us and made new friends with intelligent, thoughtful members of kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc..
But we need to spread out.
Not only have we stressed the server with thousands of immigrating users, but we were being watched by darker forces, namely Meta and Instagram.
A quick search of the net will show that we were not the first mass-migration. The first migration was last year when people from 'the bird site' (rhymes with jitter) fled Elon Musk's new regime. Most of those people moved to Mastodon.
We largely moved to kbin. Kbin.social to be more exact.
I'm a member of both Mastodon and kbin, and a couple of posts shocked me. The first one about Meta I have found again:
https://mastodon.social/@gnarkotics/110568580882355105
The second one about Instagram I have failed to locate, but the gist was that Instagram had reached out to one of the larger Fediverse servers and asked the person who runs to have a meeting 'off the record'. That person turned them down and told other members of the Fediverse what happened. The general consensus is that this was going to be a monetary offer to allow Instagram to further colonize the Fediverse by purchasing one of the larger servers.
And therein lies the problem: if the majority of users gravitate to a few large servers, then that leaves those larger servers vulnerable to exploitation.
I, as a recent immigrant, did not understand this. I thought that, intuitively, we should all gather in one place and grow the server. It's the exact opposite. We need to spread out to smaller instances. This didn't really register with me until I spoke with this person.
https://fedi.getimiskon.xyz/objects/77a0f3cd-6f31-42f7-a3ea-29af8b25c0b3
Remember too that having an account on a smaller instance still allows us to see everything on kbin.social. For example, look at this:
We are looking at a mixture of posts from Lemmy and kbin.
Moving to a smaller instance does not limit your interactions. What damages the fediverse is people trying to recreate all of Reddit on one instance.
TLDR: If you like it here, the best thing you can do for the fediverse right now is to set up on one of the less populous instances.
I invite correction and clarifications.
EDIT: Adding further sources below.
Meta/Facebook is inviting Fediverse admins under NDA for “meetings” (mstdn.social)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384207
Facebook, Inc. is planning to join the Fediverse. How do we make it lose as much money as possible?
https://www.loomio.com/d/QoH98Gg6/facebook-inc-is-planning-to-join-the-fediverse-how-do-we-make-it-lose-as-much-money-as-possible
Beware Of Meta Offering Gifts To Mastodon
https://medium.com/nextwithtech/beware-of-meta-offering-gifts-to-mastodon-6adb317e039d
Meta vs Mastodon: Battle for the Future of Decentralized Social Media
https://marketingnewscanada.com/news/meta-vs-mastodon-battle-for-the-future-of-decentralized-social-media
Legal-Copyright discussion from Mastodon yesterday
ttps://mas.to/@franktaber/110602489997086618
And a cartoon to boot
That doesn't make any sense. Why would Facebook be interested in buying existing instances? The code is open source, they can use it without asking permission. Their server infrastructure is way better that anything we have. And our user base is ridiculously small compared to theirs (Instagram has more than one billion users!). The danger of Facebook taking over the Fediverse is not that they buy instances, it's that they Embrace-Extend-Extinguish us.
That being said, I do think that we "are using the Fediverse wrong", and that we should gravitate to smaller instances of like-minded people. This would make much easier instance-level moderation and server load, and de-federation would make more sense. Now there are a bunch of generalist big instance (kbin.social, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, beehaw.org, sh.itjust.works) that are federating/defederating for reasons that aren't completely transparent to their users. But if you have, say, a small doglove.rs instance and a small catlove.rs instance, they can defederate themselves without impacting users that are not involved in the beef amongst the instances.
Meta/Facebook is inviting Fediverse admins under NDA for “meetings” (mstdn.social)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384207
Facebook, Inc. is planning to join the Fediverse. How do we make it lose as much money as possible?
https://www.loomio.com/d/QoH98Gg6/facebook-inc-is-planning-to-join-the-fediverse-how-do-we-make-it-lose-as-much-money-as-possible
Beware Of Meta Offering Gifts To Mastodon
https://medium.com/nextwithtech/beware-of-meta-offering-gifts-to-mastodon-6adb317e039d
Meta vs Mastodon: Battle for the Future of Decentralized Social Media
https://marketingnewscanada.com/news/meta-vs-mastodon-battle-for-the-future-of-decentralized-social-media
Legal-Copyright discussion from Mastodon yesterday
ttps://mas.to/@franktaber/110602489997086618
And a cartoon to boot
https://cutie.city/@nuz/110602855304673785
Beehaw in particular seems to be really defederation trigger happy.
They have defederated from sh.itjust.works and I really don't know why they've done that.
It was because sh.itjust.works is open to registration (no need for manual approval) so the risk of spam/bots/bad actors is much higher. And unfortunately the moderation tools are not really good yet, so they decided to defederate for the moment. But they said they will reconsider the decision when mod tools become mature enough
That's what they say but I honestly haven't noticed anything significant issue with spam on this platform.
I'm sure it exists to some extent, but that's what blocking is for isn't it?
I haven't seen any spam either, but then I don't spend a lot of time here either. Perhaps it's just for prevention too, i don't really know
About the blocking thing, that is actually one of the few situations where blocking accounts is not effective, as spammers will just create more. But I agree, most of the other issues that people want to solve with defederation can be solved with blocking