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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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People forget. They go for convenience. That is how we ended up in our present state. Facebook led efforts against net neutrality too in some countries. But how many know/remember that? Amongst all other things they did.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They’ll probably get mad that people can take their ball and go home by going to another instance without ads and signing away access to all of their personal data but get the same content. If they defederate, to me that’s the trash taking itself out.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (26 children)

I'm more concerned of them integrating new features and bullying everyone else into following to integrate them or else.

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[–] PeanutsHere 17 points 1 year ago (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (7 children)

I guess this will already have been said, but nonetheless:

I like the feeling of community as it is right now in the Fediverse very much.

Most of me hopes that it will not successfully federate with Meta, ever; or if it "must", in a way that will be mostly irrelevant to me (communities I wouldn't subscribe to in the first place, anyway).

I don't see how that, in turn, would give Meta any control over the parts of the Fediverse that I care about. If they want to join and contribute in good faith, fine. If not, also fine. Why should it change anything for Fediverse "centered" communities?

I never cared about size or majority, but about quality of content and discourse. And I find that in those points, the current Fediverse much outshines anything else I've seen (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, ...) in the last decade or so.

[–] alertsleeper 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That was my first thought too, until I found this:

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Blog post explainer

Wikipedia page

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

I think you are wildly overestimating the stickiness of the fediverse. The sorts of people who will prefer Threads are going to prefer Threads whether or not it's federated. On the other hand, the sorts of people who prefer the fediverse will never switch to Threads even if it becomes the smoothest experience ever. But the latter cohort is likely much, much smaller than the former.

[–] howler 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think meta will dominate the space that federates with it. Hopefully none of my instances will do that... And I will be unaffected.

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[–] MargotRobbie 14 points 1 year ago (6 children)

"unethically defedrate"? I think you may have misunderstood how federation works, since "defederate" is just another word for "ban yourself from seeing that instance's content", if Threads defederate from a small Mastodon instance, for example, that Mastodon instance can still see all the content on Threads, but the Threads user won't be able to see anything posted by that Mastodon instance.

Also, any instance can and should be able to federate and defederate any other instance for any or even no reason, that's the entire point.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

What is the motivation for this post? Did Meta announce they will be making an instance or is the OP just thinking ahead?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I am not worried about this. I think threads is going to end up like all the fascist instances. Perhaps they will have more users... Good for them. But the rest of us will defederate and they will become an isolated instance. Which begs the question, why use activity pub at all? I suppose maybe its so they can run multiple servers themselves and piggy back on the infrastructure that was laid down for free. As long as most of us defederate its not going to change much. You could get about as much data scraping timelines now as they could siphon up with federating. So small instances will continue to federate with each other and that will end up being a smaller amount of the people using the fediverse. The only way this matters is if we obsess about numbers. But honestly most of us can't afford to run a big instance anyway, so obsessing about unattainable numbers is pointless. It doesn't change the economics at all, it doesn't change the fact that small instances will federate with each other and not stuff we don't like. It may change the privacy stuff, which is something we can fix with some vigilance.

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[–] Gazumbo 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Is there a list of instances that have defederated (or announced they will) from Threads?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

Compared to Meta, all other instances are small.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Luckily, they can't force federated access to be slow. Once you federate with them, their content is copied to your instance. It's not necessary for every fediverse user to contact Threads, it'll just be served from each user's home instance

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[–] Takina_sOldPairTM 12 points 1 year ago

Where's that Fediverse's anti-Meta treaty again? Should update em clauses by now.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I agree. Ultimately, I think there is a real chance that there ends up being 2 major fediverses. One that is federated with Meta, and one that is not.

I think that those joined to meta will ultimately become like the losers table in a school cafeteria. They can hear all of the conversations, but nobody will engage them. I’d rather be in the not-federated camp.

[–] Gerula 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Meta or any other corporation with interest in social media sphere (to be read: wanting to make profit on the back of the users) will, sooner or later, kill the fediverse if allowed to enter.

Why?

Simple because the reason for a corporation to exist is to make profit and that profit has to grow each year - so there is all the incentive in the world to milk everything from the user until they can then move on to the next "thing".

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Everything is gonna be alright.

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