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.
Can someone eli5 what’s going on with this?
meta is trash and we don’t want its data getting all snuggly with ours. because ew.
now you’re up to speed.
edit: data privacy concerns are the main issue
If Meta can federate with an instance, it can collect all the available data within that instance. This seems to be what everyone is overlooking on the downsides of Meta federation.
Which is public data, you don't need to run an instance to have it. What am I missing?
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Exactly. I don't understand why so many people have this mentality of 'the fediverse must grow, or it's a failure', but I think a lot of them are from the recent reddit exodus (I am too, for the record) and are addicted to the firehose of content that a massive social media platform brings.
I participated less and less on reddit in recent years, after joining in 2007, partly because it became such a behemoth. Nowadays, I am enjoying the modest size of my lemmy instance and the values I've seen espoused throughout. It's like a small(er) get together of like-minded people rather than an open-door rager - the first has always had more appeal to me, personally.
Growth is important to any social media ecosystem because you have to hit a critical mass of users to continue meaningfully existing - particularly, you have to have enough users to convince content creators to leave their current environment, since they're the most likely to be entrenched where they are.
That said, the distinction is that to a corporate/capitalist social media platform, infinite and exponential growth is the goal. To a FOSS social media platform, growth is simply a by-product of the real goal of meeting a public need.
I think the feeling of exclusivity that comes with being early to any scene is neat, but more users means more diversification of instances and communities, and we'll get to see the blossoming of hyper-specific, idiosyncratic, often deranged communities that made up the best part of Reddit. So growth isn't all bad.
Assumption 1: Meta / Mark Z are objectively untrustworthy
Assumption 2: The Fediverse is a threat to the entire internet advertising machine
Assumption 3: Threads will be a hospitable place for right wing hatemongers. Therefore, federating with it exposes our most vulnerable users and communities to a deluge of (often invisible) hate and harassment.
Assumption 4: Most of the ways that they could use their billions of users and army of programmers to slowly choke us off would go through federation
I think if you believe all four of those assumptions defederation is the clear choice