The arguments I've heard about tracking etc are misguided and don't understand the actual risks.
Firstly, posts on the fediverse are already likely being consumed by advertising platforms like Facebook & Google. It would be trivial for big tech companies to setup relays that act as scrapers.
Secondly, the value in platform's tracking individuals is for advertising. There is no mechanism for these platforms to identify you browsing the we if your instance federated with threads. Your instance won't share cookie sessions etc with threads. It doesn't increase your exposure.
Thirdly, these platforms have the know how to deal with spam and they will be incentivised to share that tech with other federated instances.
Don't get me wrong, Facebook is an evil company. But I haven't heard a decent argument as to why them joining the fediverse is a bad thing. We always have the option to defederate in the future.
Change my mind.
Basically this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
First they will add loads of new users and become the dominant instances. Then, they will add their own proprietary features that other instances cannot support. Finally, their extensions become the new de-facto standard, marginalizing the original implementations.
Since Meta has proven itself to be an evil company that does not act in good faith, it is better to not federate with them from the start.
Exactly this. In a federated network, the instance with the majority of users could dictate the protocol, forcing the smaller issues to continually adapt or die. See this post for a very real example of this.
But why do the current lemmy instances have to die if facebook decides to make ActivityPub+goldextra? We'll just stay on our branch, maybe lose a few users who should know better. Facebook isn't even making use of ActivityPub's federation anyway, which is why we are here.
I'm actually afraid that they won't defederate at some point but find some way to track the activities of the federated servers.
Becsuse you don't move to the next phase until you reach a milestone. The embrace is the first step, to convert a small percentage of users of the original platform. Once you have those, you extend your features to have those users recruit more users to that specific instance or implementation, since they are more feature-rich or stable or whatever. Then once you have a critical point of users on your instance, you defederate from all others and develop your walled garden which now has all the users and the content.
That instance will have all the users I donβt wanna read about. So I donβt care. Create another instance if they gobbled yours and move on. Iβm an ex redditor, do I want another corporation to rule over me? Nah, thanks.
I was gonna say that I never expected or wanted lemmy/mastodon to become mainstream anyway, far from it. And like dual-booting linux and windows, there are just some things I won't abdicate in favour of convenience or having more followers/software or being on a platform with more market power.
But you know what, it's a spectrum, from the volunteer/libre-heavy to the hideous proprietary tyrannies:
??? > FOSS > wikipedia > reddit > google > microsoft > twitter > facebook > ???
Maybe if we are able to accommodate a large fraction of the mod community of reddit and let the flexibility of federated diversity and "3rd-party apps" flourish against facebook's top-down approach we might create a wikipedia-like oasis...
But probably not, because there is too much money to make in appmaking rather than written content creation.
Yup, exactly this for me too. Been done a thousand times before by companies like them. Plus the fact that the fediverse is not run by any company is just really nice - we don't need them.
Thanks for explaining it. Good job.
Even if they do go through with that and become bloated, doesn't that just mean the fediverse's userbase will be back where we started? Mastodon's ceo/founder seems to agree
Doesn't bother me much honestly, I'd rather be able to follow some of my favourite artists on Threads from the comfort of Mastodon/Lemmy, even if that's only until Threads goes downhill.
No, because when (not if) Threads goes downhill they will have become the dominant platform with all the users and special communities (just like Reddit was and still is). I want Lemmy to become that platform, not Threads. The whole idea is not to be beholden to yet another corporate techbro overlord.
Until I've read your comment I always thought that I would be a good idea but now I'm all against it.
No amount of extension will force instances to change. I think your point assumes instance owners will want to have access to those users from threads for some reason.
I would only be worried about the EEE thing if meta assigned a team of developers to work on the Lemmy codebase full time.
Meta has blown 10's of Billions on the their failed metaverse and you're wondering if they will have a team of devs on Lemmy? They already do - it will start with the protocol first, not the UI, but you'll start seeing PRs there too.
You're probably right, we need to borrow the Linux model with some ahole at the top cutting out crap before it takes over.
No offense Linus, love your work.
Facebook is currently the social media defacto standard. Instances can always defederate in the future. The EEE argument doesn't fit in this situation.
Microsoft was the standard when the phrase was coined