I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:
- Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won’t care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
- 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, and in the end the common users just won’t care. They will use Threads because its faster.
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.
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.
My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.
I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.
We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
One thing I don’t understand is why would meta even federate with anyone outside of their own instances anyway?
Makes no sense to ever open up to allow any other instances in. Not like they are crying for users.
The fediverse just makes sense in their own bubble. Turn Facebook, Instagram, and their other apps into the fediverse and federate them all together.
I don’t expect them to ever open up to the actual fediverse. Same with BlueSky. I feel like all of these companies will USE the fediverse but in a closed bubble.
Well? Apparently, they plan on making it happen. https://help.instagram.com/169559812696339
Just like they did with the Internet.
It’s a classic tactic, you open up compatibility with an open source platform so everyone moves to the fancy app that supports it all (threads) then they drop support and kill the platform (fediverse). They’ll do it and will likely be successful unless they’re blocked completely right now.
I don’t see why we can’t just stay on the fediverse, enjoy threads as long as meta wants to play ball, and then wave goodbye when they decide they don’t want to federate anymore. Nobody’s forcing anyone to move from the fediverse to meta, and I think the current demographic here is unlikely to volunteer for another walled garden experience.
Worst case scenario is we end up right back where we are now- a niche community prioritizing independence and decentralization.
The problem with federating with anything owned by meta is that it is a data syphon. I don’t think we can fully protect ourselves from that. If they want the data most of it is easy to come by by just having any ol mastodon account or running a malicious instance or just scraping what is public and inferring the rest. However we shouldn’t be inviting a threat like that into our backyard. We should definitely not be federating with them. Furthermore it gives them the opportunity to bloat things down with ads or DOS small instances with amounts of traffic and data they can’t handle and they could make it prohibitively expensive to run an instance that federates with them. Nipping those problems in the bud requires showing them the door early.
BlueSky will use their own protocol, so they will indeed be a closed bubble.
As for Meta, my (totally unjustified) hunch is that they’re expecting that other big names like Twitter, BlueSky, Google or Amazon will migrate or create their own ActivityPub services, and they want to be early adopters. If Threads is successful, I could see them migrating Facebook and Instagram too.
That’s my assessment also. This isn’t about extinguishing us, it’s about the other whales. AFAICT, they want and expect us us to be do well. (Delete could use a confirmation…)
That’s my assessment also. It’s not about us, it’s about the other whales. They actually want to see us doing well, afaict.
Embrace, extend, extinguish
Once they’re federated they have full admin access. So they can see who liked posts, and lots of other info.
They could be doing this already, for all we know. We don’t know who owns all those little instances out there. Large corporations or government surveillance just need to set up a discreetly named instance or two and start subscribing, and they’ll get all the data they want. (In fact, could that be part of the reason for the explosion in silent bot accounts?)
Aw shit, yeah, obviously… The folks mining data are going to be using innocent looking nodes to do it… Okay you convinced me, I won’t pull the plug.
Oh… yeah… that’s totally it. By federating, they get to mine us for data the same as if we were on their service. Okay, I’ll pull the plug.
This reads like sarcasm but it isn’t.
They of course have no interest in growing the fediverse as an independent alternative, they want to use it for their own ends. They want to serve people the fediverse’s free content under their own umbrella and rules (and ads of course) to monetize stuff that doesn’t belong to them, or anyone else. It’s all pretty straightforward greed and capitalizing on an opportunity.
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