We have to stick to our guns and keep supporting the small instances.
Admins needs to strike first and defederate from Meta before they do.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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I guess this will already have been said, but nonetheless:
I like the feeling of community as it is right now in the Fediverse very much.
Most of me hopes that it will not successfully federate with Meta, ever; or if it "must", in a way that will be mostly irrelevant to me (communities I wouldn't subscribe to in the first place, anyway).
I don't see how that, in turn, would give Meta any control over the parts of the Fediverse that I care about. If they want to join and contribute in good faith, fine. If not, also fine. Why should it change anything for Fediverse "centered" communities?
I never cared about size or majority, but about quality of content and discourse. And I find that in those points, the current Fediverse much outshines anything else I've seen (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, ...) in the last decade or so.
I share your priorities, but I don't think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us... The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they'll ask "how can we extract value from this investment?". That's what a corporation is, it can't help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn
But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media
How would they ensure this latter thing?
In my current understanding, it's readily possible today (on Lemmy and related software), what could Meta do to keep this from continuing to work?
By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn't viable.
Personally, I'd do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. "they only run servers so they can steal your data", "look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he's abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!" "The only reason you'd use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals"
They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative
Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we've been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn't care, but now I get push back
Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they'll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they'll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I'd start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south
Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it's not a healthy form of social media I'm not going to spend much time here, and I'm extremely passionate about it
And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.
They'll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.
We're ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible
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yeah, i really, well and truly do not wish to be linked with meta on fediverse. it's obvious the damage it will do either way. may as well stay as we are and avoid the termoil which meta will bring us should they decide to federate.