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:
- 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.
- 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.
I’m totally willing to discuss my thoughts since it seems I’m in the minority on this threads mania-
Once Threads launches it’ll obviously have a lot more users than the whole fediverse combined, maybe even 90% of all users. Now let’s say some instances with barely 1-2% users and small content feed defederate from it. Do people think a new user who does not care about things like open source or privacy will join the niche instance? No, people will go where the content is. Big social media giants will jump on fediverse bandwagon and instances who dont fetch their data will become extremely niche communtites (some might like that but it’s not good for overall fediverse health).
Instead let’s say we keep federated with threads, and make posts like how YSK: other instances don’t track your data, other instances are free from corpo greed, other instances are run by normal people etc etc and make users aware and let them naturally migrate. Ideally, meta will bring the eyeballs which we can help to make fediverse as a whole grow.
imo it’s naive to think that us 100k users defederating will put even a dent on threads. Insta tik-tok people will join the new trendy social media and generate content. The only solution is to make people constantly aware that better alternatives to view the same content exist.
The potential problem is not us making a dent on Threads, I couldn’t care less if people want to use it. The potential problem is that they do the EEE (link1, link2) on the Fediverse. It’s not us trying to steal users from them, or preventing people from joining them, it’s about preventing them from becoming the standard way for people to access the Fediverse, thus giving them control over the protocol’s direction and giving them the possibility to, once they are the de facto standard, defederate and kill the rest of small communities.
That, and personally, I wouldn’t like Meta meddling with the protocol, simply because there is no beneficial outcome for them other than gaining control of it, which would be horrible.
Let’s say all of mastodon instances not federating Threads. What stopping Meta to do EEE on ActivityPub? That protocol is not owned by mastodon creator or other devs. It’s handled by W3C afaik
Nothing is, other than the users themselves by not federating with them.
users won’t want to use an instance that can’t view content from threads (since that where’s most content would be), but they’ll be much more open to joining an open source instance that federated and views stuff from there as well.
I wouldn’t want to use an instance that shows me Meta content, even if that’s where the majority of content is, and I don’t think I’m alone in that.
I am here because I value quality over quantity.
This is the question I want a proper answer to. Anyone?