Fediverse

Meta or any other big player that looks to ride on the fediverse space ultimately gets nothing that's not already available publicly, and can't push their ads or data-scraping apps on the users of the fedi. In effect they'll either play nice and maybe a few people interact between them, or they don't and things continue as they are today. There have been a couple posts out there of the history with Google/XMPP and now the statement by Mastodon. Private hosting of open protocols has always been a threat to the big players. In the end with the Google affair, XMPP still exists, I used to use it for my household chat, but found other options like RocketChat and now NextCloud Talk more to my taste and easier to maintain. Meta can't kill the ActivityPub system, only the users walking away from it can do that, or, I guess ISPs if they did some sort of shady blocking en-masse but that's another matter all together.

I have no use for Meta in any of their forms, and would certainly push others to use the OG version of things that doesn't scrape all their data to sell them the latest bullshit they don't need, but there's little reason to fear them either.

The instances defederating Meta will shrink and collapse into their own seperate Defediverse. The debate shows the risk of so many hobbyist instances and admins powertripping their view who the users are allowed to talk to, that a corporation is perhaps more reliable. It hurts the users, hampers communication channels and people will flock more to the Mainfediverse further accelerating more power to fewer instances.

If you were looking for a network seperated from the outside general world, you perhaps should have joined a closed instance, network and forum. It goes against all what the Fediverse tries to be, a multi-purpose communication tool across communities, corporations and cultures with the possibility to create seperated and shielded communities.

Love the dialogue here but you always have to follow the money trail. The best way to keep what we love is to bankroll our instances to keep them running and scalable to additional users without ads. Remember, if you aren't paying for the product then you become the product. Meta has nothing without selling ads or monetizing user data. That's their business model. As long as we chip in we can always maintain our independence. I'm fine with never seeing or interacting with content from Threads.

This is much a better argument than the XMPP comparison.

Thanks for the post!

Then let's warn people against using anything Meta and by doing so drive people away from it.

Honestly, I don’t see how this is a threat to “small” instances. Why would Meta target defederation with some dude’s 5 user instance that barely registers on anyone’s radar?

Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.

Well, that hasn't been my experience so far, and they are not even federating yet :-D

Can small instances handle the traffic that Threads will be generating? I imagine small instances may get overwhelmed by bandwidth / cpu constraints, due to not having the budget that Meta has. Smaller instances that get bogged down might find people migrating to Threads simply because it will be able to handle the load.

If they defederate from other instances, they just means Threads users won't see those instances. Those instances will still see Threads content, if they want. The content is also shared across instances this way, so their servers largely don't matter. Whenever Lemmy.World or Yiffit.net is down or having problems, I just bop over to Kbin and it's like those other two instances never actually dropped out since I can still see and interact with their posts.

I don't see how in any way shape or form Threads can or will fuck up the entire fediverse when even if they have a majority of the users, their content gets spread around the whole network and doesn't stay on shit they control.

And if you're worried about their app collecting data: then don't fucking use it. Unless you think their app, on someone else's phone, will collect YOUR data somehow, this is a completely bullshit argument.