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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

  • PeanutsHere@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    I don’t exactly understand how this is going to kill small instances? I just stared with the Fediverse stuff so I might have understood it wrong:

    Point 1: “Meta will unethically defederate from instances…” I’m assuming that means they’ll block access to those instances for anyone that has an account on the Meta instance? I don’t really see the problem with that. This won’t affect small instances at all because people who want to view other instances will have an account somewhere else and people using the meta instance probably wouldn’t have heard of the fediverse in the first place if it wasn’t for meta. Its a win basically since they’ll get introduced to the fediverse concept which is a step in the right direction. And small instances will stay as they are which is unaffected.

    Point 2: If I understood it correctly they can only slow down access to other instances if one uses an account created on the meta instance? So same argument as in point 1.

      • Move to lemm.ee@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Do I think facebook et al will kill “The Fediverse”: Maybe. But that will be because we’ll finally stress test things and find all those issues and determine what is a fundamental flaw versus something updatable. But I would rather use a good product/software than get cranky that one specific protocol/implementation which is demonstrably inferior got pushed out.

        This just means that you’re not really here for the stated purpose of fediverse (to create a digital commons) you’re here for an alternative to reddit. You don’t care if it’s centralised and in the hands of one person or not, you’re just mad at what reddit did.

        What this misses is that reddit didn’t do what it did just because Spez is a meanie. It did what it did because it’s what EVERY capitalist would have done in the run up to IPO.

        What you miss here is that you’re just advocating for exactly the same conditions that caused what you didn’t like. And for some reason you don’t think those conditions would re-create exactly the same outcome in future.

        You fail to understand that these outcomes are not the project of individuals with the wrong ideas. They are systemic issues and the entire point of fediverse is to subvert that system and the many problems it creates.