this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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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.

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[–] JshKlsn 53 points 1 year ago (26 children)

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.

[–] kenyard 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Once they're federated they have full admin access. So they can see who liked posts, and lots of other info.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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?)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

This reads like sarcasm but it isn't.

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