this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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Not sure what to think of this honestly. Like imagine a small email provider decided to block Gmail, that's a death sentence. It's impossible to get people to switch apps when they have to leave behind all of the content and people they used an app to interact with. And let's be honest, threads is going to run at a loss for a long time to grow their userbase before they start pulling weird shit. We need to have a migration path when that happens, and if threads is blocked everywhere, people will lose their content and contacts upon switching, so they won't do it.
I consider email (and snail mail) a significantly more essential service than social media. Email service providers starting to block each other is much more likely to have a negative effect on my life than being disconnected from some friends, influencers or current news
Gmail doesn't use an algorithm designed to make you depressed and lead to a higher rate of suicide among teenagers. Facebook and Instagram does. And Meta knows it did since day one of implementation.
The difference is that the email protocol has long been established and any new email client is built to that protocol standard. What we have here is an open protocol still being developed. The fear is that FB will force changes into that protocol and take it over. Then it will no longer be an open development protocol. By expunging FB right now before they get a firm grip on the userbase it can preemptively prevent FB from causing damage.
We are kind of in unexplored territory right now. You could compare it to google/MS taking over xmpp but it's not quite the same situation either.
But the reality is that the current fediverse doesnt need facebook to be successful. It already has the users to continue to grow. By combining user pools facebook would have the majority share with their instagram users which means they would have a controlling share of users and would leach users away from the fediverse over time until they broke away at which point fediverse would die as most users would be forced to follow in order to keep their feeds.
This way those feeds never mingle with FB and thus fb cant leech them.
In the long term, alternative platforms need to be built on something different than outrage and "not being the bad company". In the end, the vast majority of people cares very little about the underlying technology, they just want their content and people to interact with. Mastodon is in decline already, the fediverse shouldn't be a place where people come to say "wow, [company] sure does suck", and then go back to that company if they actually need a piece of information or reach a person that does not know or care what an API or federated protocol is, aka 99% of the population.
Lemmy should specifically be about not catering to these kinds of people. People that just want their content and don't care about anything else can stay on reddit/threads.
I see Lemmy and the fediverse more as an evolution of how we approach the web. We should absolutely cater to more casual users eventually, and try to have as many people as possible to leave behind these greedy internet monopolies. We clearly saw that they're not the way to go.
How we get there is a bit of a question mark, it's clear that there's a big push from more involved/aware users to break away from big corporations. This doesn't mean we're building on outrage, just that it was the initial push to get something new started.
I see where you're coming from, but you're underestimating scumpanies like Meta et. al. https://infosec.pub/post/400702
In an ideal world, your suggestion might work. Unfortunately it will fail in practice. How are we to determine when it's not too late to migrate?
Personally I don't care for those users. If they want to blindly follow their piper, let them. But I don't want that cancer ruining more OSS.
That's why it has to be done now - before we rely on them for content.
This isn't email or LinkedIn, it's not about who's on it - it's about content and the community
If we join with them, we'll get way more content and a way bigger community - not a better one though.
We need enough, and we need organic growth. We don't need a firehose, and definitely not one held by the people who made social media what it is everywhere else
I would agree if we were talking about another centralized social media site, bit I'm here to escape the interface of sites like Facebook.
I know lots of people will disagree with me, but I personally think it’s madness and will drive most people to use threads.net instead of any other ActivityPub instance. Also threads.net isn’t even federating yet.