this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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I think this is a culture clash between the privacy minded FOSS crowd that is naturally drawn to a project like Lemmy and the influx of average redditors thats just looking for a new home.
If you already have zero trust in these megacorporations you will naturally gravitate towards preemtive defederation.
I happen to fall into the center of that venn diagram and honestly I feel like the "preemptively defederate!" crowd is acting before it's even truly clear how to best act and everyone else who says "ehh let's wait and see how this is going to go before we act" is just getting drowned out by the folks screaming about the end of the Fediverse.
I don't trust Meta any further than I can throw their servers, but I find it hard to imagine there won't be some middle ground that isn't "BLOCK EVERYONE WHO SO MUCH AS TOUCHED A META PRODUCT ONCE" that ends up being the healthiest option
Edit to add: I've taken a similar approach to the instant defederating of Lemmy instances with unverified signups since the current phase of Lemmy is so fresh I have no reason to take a hardline stance before it's clear exactly what the ramifications are. Obviously as an individual I also have the benefit of being able to just go with the flow that an instance admin might not but still
I can totally see where you're coming from.
On the one hand, the reason why I have chosen to eshew all social media and run degoogled Android on my phone is because of privacy concerns. So if Meta federates, I can access all that content from an app and network that respects my privacy, so that's good right?
My problem is not so much privacy, I'm more worried about the dominant position Meta achieves on the fediverse by it's sheer size. It will absolutely dwarf everything else. We already know this by just looking at the numbers, so if we wish to preserve the culture of the fediverse I see no other choice but to defederate and set up quarantined servers that exclusively federates with Meta and nothing else. Any server that federates will only see posts from Meta.
There might potentially be technical solutions to limit how much you see from one instance, but we don't have them right now.
For people in the FOSS sphere there is also a sense of "fool me once" when it comes to megacorporations engaging with projects, e.g. Google with XMPP, Microsoft with internet explorer, Google with Chrome and so on. There is simply no trust and we have been burned before in ways that has left lasting impressions that might be hard to understand if you have not experienced it yourself. Maybe it reaches a degree of suspicion that might seem paranoid to others.
I also feel that Lemmy right now gives me back a sense of what the internet used to be, before the walled gardens, and I feel that it is a fragile state of affairs that must be protected at all costs. It feels like I can finally breathe again after a long time with my head beneath the waters, and I don't want to be plunged under again.
Sorry for the ramble, I just felt like I had to put my feelings in print.