It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml admin team took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it’s users will not be allowed to proceed.
We strongly encourage other instance administrators to do the same, given the grave threat they pose to the fediverse.
So far I’ve only got a lot of unsatisfying answers (from a factual perspective). It seems to boil down to how much individuals on the fediverse fear Meta is in their capability of doing a full take-over. Personally, I feel like we’re pretty protected form that. I’ve posted my questions, and still looking for some good answers here:
https://lemmy.world/post/1118810
It’s pretty damn simple actually. Let’s say we fully federate with Threads, what will happen?
Threads gets a massive amount of users, they already have 20 million sign-ups on the first day! Their user base will be gigantic
We’ll get a big influx of content (if Meta does the federation properly), huge communities will pop up on Threads and you’ll join those communities. It’s unlikely that Threads users will join communities hosted on smaller instances, why join a community with 1k users if Meta has one with 200k?
Now Meta controls 99% of the users AND content. They can switch off federation at any moment. Maybe they cover it with “we have a new cool feature, but it breaks federation, sorry!” in that moment all our Lemmy instances lose most of their users and content. And you lose all your communities you joined
Lemmy users will migrate to threads, because they want their content back, the fediverse dies (except for a few hundred to thousand hold-over nerds who won’t give up)
Fuck Meta.
Damn thinking about this, this is exactly what Reddit did with 3rd party apps
Embrace openness by allowing 3rd party apps on the platform and gain user base in the process
Once user base is high enough, start introducing features that aren’t available (chat, polls) in the API to entice users to abandon 3rd party apps for new features
Once the users is high enough, cut 3rd party apps the fuck off and coerce users to use their app with no alternatives. Terminally online users won’t ask questions and will transition without hesitation to the official app to get their subreddit community fix.
It was even worse. Reddit didn’t make their own app, they bought a third party app (Alien Blue) and made it worse.
But nobody cared about chat, polls, bought avatars or whatever, I was happy using RIF and rather didn’t have those things. Reddit wants you to have and use those things so you spend extra money in their shop. One more reason to get rid of third party apps.
Except in reddit’s case, both Chat and Polls are features that were hardly used.
This, starting to feel a strong astroturf vibe here because 10 people upvoted the comment above you and yet nobody downvoted yours despite them being made within an hour of each other. It’s like they have bots going and upvoting each other’s pro-Meta posts. FUCK Meta and Reddit, these types of greedy CEO’s who don’t give a rats if they make the world better or worse as long as they make a buck are exactly the reason the people needed their own solution. Meta is literally the antithesis of everything decentralization is about. How the F did these people end up here if corporate control of their communication is just fine with them?
Damn, i can’t believe how many people immediately jump to the astroturfing accusation instead of discussing the points you raised. I think we can all agree that meta is evil and we shouldn’t trust them. The solution should be to build a network that’s resilient to bad actors rather than thinking we can just block all the bad actors. As long as there are independent fediverse servers supported by their communities, it’s hard to see how meta could totally take over the entire fediverse.
My bigger concern is that meta could gain influence over the activitypub standard, but that’s not a battle we can win by simply blocking meta servers.
It’s only hard to imagine for those who haven’t learned the history of facebooks nefarious practices, or don’t know the many successful cases of EEE and sabotage these companies have carried out.
Luckily, many of us do remember, and are not going to let the cancer grow.
I’m just saying I’ve seen a lot of vague comments about how evil meta is (and i don’t disagree) but very little discussion about how they would actually destroy the fediverse. At this point, it seems more likely that the fediverse destroys itself when all servers defederate from all other servers out of paranoia.
See this comment.
If meta gathers a ton of users and then defederates, then wouldn’t we just be back to exactly where we are right now?
No, because they want you to get hooked to their content, like a drug. The third step of EEE is where they draw people away from open standards into their walled gardens. This was in the comment I linked you.
If the biggest fediverse communities are all ones on meta, then after they get the fediverse addicted to their communities, they’ll draw everyone who was on it out.
I still don’t understand how that would kill the fediverse though. The people who want meta content can make accounts on meta services. They’re obviously not going to convince you and I to sign up there. And i would guess most others on the fediverse right now are people like us who are happy to be moving away from companies like meta and twitter. If there’s some mass exodus where all the meta fanboys left lemmy, i think the rest of us would be okay with that.
Now if they actually find a way to break the activity pub standard, then that would be a serious threat, but I’m not sure how defederating would solve that.
It’s been explained already, if you don’t understand or believe it that’s fine.
There are other issues beyond EEE however. If Meta can federate with an instance, it can collect all the available data within that instance. Cambridge Analitica would love that. Also meta blurs the line between content and advertising and that type of advertising is not healthy to federate with.
EXACTLY, so kindly stop arguing with people telling you that Lemmy users should not let them into this backyard due to Meta’s history. You’re being willfully ignorant and combative here while refusing to be persuaded by the people telling you exactly why it’s a bad idea. You both don’t understand (or won’t) and are STILL arguing your point anyway.
If your arguments can’t be distinguished from legit astroturfing, then you’re obviously making terrible pro-corporate arguments on a decidedly anti-corporate platform. Read the room and take the freaking hint.