Fediverse

Currently Reddit has significantly more users than Lemmy. Has that stopped people from signing up to Lemmy? Twitter has has significantly more users than Mastodon since forever. Has that stopped people from signing up for Mastodon? Has it killed Mastodon?

The common error I see in all the "Threads will kill the Fediverse" mania is that it assumes the same people who sign up for Threads would have otherwise signed up for Mastodon/Lemmy/Kdin/etc. 99.9% of them probably never would have. They want something that's easy and just works; and they're willing to let a company profit off their data to have it.

"unethically defedrate"? I think you may have misunderstood how federation works, since "defederate" is just another word for "ban yourself from seeing that instance's content", if Threads defederate from a small Mastodon instance, for example, that Mastodon instance can still see all the content on Threads, but the Threads user won't be able to see anything posted by that Mastodon instance.

Also, any instance can and should be able to federate and defederate any other instance for any or even no reason, that's the entire point.

I see your panic and raise you a "what's the solution?"

If you don't federate with them, people will simply just go there instead of here because a larger user base.

Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.

They absolutely have limits. For example Threads isn't in the EU yet, because of strict controls that severely limit what Meta can do.

As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user.

Small instances are already undesirable to the general public and always will be.

Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them.

No they can't. The EU will only allow them to "ethically" defederate.

When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved

If Threads is slow, people will switch to another service that is fast.

This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.

If they ask their best engineers to do something evil, most of them will quit. Why work for an evil corp when you can work almost anywhere you want?

Also they don't have the best in the world - those already left (or refused to work there in the first place).

Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.

At least on iOS, that type of cross app tracking doesn't work anymore (unless the user opts into it, which nobody ever does). Apple's change to how tracking works is costing Meta billions of dollars... and protecting the privacy of about a billion people. Yay Apple.

But more to the point, people who are worried about privacy will only install Threads if it's the only way to reach thier friends/family. Since Threads will be federated, they won't ahve that reason.

I have Facebook and Facebook Messenger on my phone and once Threads is federated I will be enouraging all my friends to sign up for Threads, so I can reach them. If my Mastodon instance defederates Threads, I'll be leaving that instance (Lemmy, on the other hand, I might not care so much).

My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp.

Better in what way? One of my metrics is being able to contact people who will not sign up for Mastodon.

I love the fediverse specifically because it allows me to reach people on other instances. Defederating should be limited to harmful content (and I don't see any evidence of harm in Thread).

We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.

Even I won't use Signal. Talk to me when I can install it on both my phones, instead of just one of them (using the same account on both phones).

Finishing on a more positive note - Threads is going to be full of ads. I think a lot of people won't be OK with that... and if threads is federated, then people will sign up for small instances like this one. I think we'll be fine.

Honestly, I still have more hope for Signal compared to Lemmy/fediverse. As much as I like it here, Signal is just so much more user-friendly and explainable. I am also slowly making people around me set it up.