It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml admin team took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it's users will not be allowed to proceed.
We strongly encourage other instance administrators to do the same, given the grave threat they pose to the fediverse.
This is the gist: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Basically, big companies can destroy decentralised network from within once big enough people adopt it.
What they do is
Embrace - adopt the network with their own proprietary system, like Threads for example, as opposed to other system in the fediverse right now that are open source.
Extend - spend resources like money, manpower, and even extensive knowledge on how to expand and make the network a better place with a lot more features while simultaneously promoting and making so that only their proprietary app can access it in the best way.
Exterminate / Extinguish - once they have good amount of users, they can start crippling the other side, like maybe Threads can see posts from Lemmy and Mastodon but not the other way around, people are gonna think that Threads is superior and leaving the original instances. They can also pull back resources like even the people who used to work on developing the network that they used to give so generously before, and such the maintainer now has no way to keep up in developing the network.
Also known as the EEE tactic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
That's users' fault. I don't want to disrespect anybody, that's not my intention, but if users are stupid enough to listen to the songs of the Sirens, that's not Sirens' fault, but users' fault.
You say that defederating is the only way to prevent EEE. But defederating doesn't prevent people to move to Threads, doesn't prevent people to listen to the songs of the Sirens. It only prevents people to see the Sirens.
Is it really? If I start selling you vitamin pills and you suddenly get addicted because the secret ingredient is diacetylmorphine, is it then your fault because you took the pills in good faith that they would be good for you?
It should be my fault, yes. Instead of going to a pharmacy, I prefer to buy random stuff from a random stranger.
In this case meta is the pharmacy I would argue and random lemmy instances are random strangers.