Meta is cancer: Don't let them metastasize.
this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Don't let them in, they are the destroyers.
I might sound a bit elitist, but the sort of people who would join Threads would lead to step 0 of the enblandening of the entire fediverse. Not to mention increased bot spam. I say this as someone who is likely enblandening the fediverse.
I've personally no issues with corporate instances, in principle. E.g. if Ford wanted to create an instance to chatter about cars etc, I'm good with that. Even the likes of Google etc might be (very!) cautiously acceptable , despite their history of EEE tactics.
Meta, however, is like gangrene. There are 2 ways to deal with it, antibiotics, or immediate amputation. We do not have an antibiotic.
Meta will almost certainly poison community here on Lemmy. Whether it is accidental, or deliberate is irrelevant. It's the nature of that particular monstrosity. Lemmy doesn't have the mass, or history to absorb the damage they will cause. The only safe option is to amputate early and hope we can contain the infection.
Defed yes
Wrong no
The more I think about this, the more I think the beauty of decentralisation is really underlined here. With multiple instances some will defederate, while others will not. This way the fediverse as a whole can get the best of both worlds. The defederated instances are safe from any malicious deeds, while the others can still profit from the added content to build a bigger userbase.
Of course existing users are worried about what their instance does and many will be disappointed especially on the big instances. But even if the instance decides to take the route that the user did not wish, they can just move to an instance that shares their values.
Exactly. Personally, I like the idea of the Fediverse going mainstream, even if it has to be via a questionable company like Meta.
But, if you don’t like that idea, that’s fine too — there will be instances with both policies.
Or it'll tear the fediverse in half, and when Meta's sudden but inevitable betrayal comes the other half will disappear into obscurity and eventual death.
Or we could wall the cancer off and hope the rest of the fediverse can continue to grow organically. That'd be my preference.
hope the rest of the fediverse can continue to grow organically
I think this is where our hopes and pessimisms diverge. I simply don't think that right now mastodon can grow organically anymore. Threads has come out as an anti-Elon option for Twitter and already has tens of millions of users. If people are now looking for Twitter alternatives, why would they think twice about mastodon? On the other hand, if they do join Threads and some Mastodon instances are federated, they could find out about the fediverse and move on to using those instances without really affecting their day to day use. Inversely if the fediverse walls itself off from the start, there is no incentive to join Mastodon anymore since there is a much bigger alternative with all your friends and people you want to follow.
Sure the betrayal of Threads is pretty much inevitable, in one way or the other, but if the fediverse can become a viable alternative in the minds of Threads users before that, a much bigger migration could be seen than with twitter now. The aggregated added growth from having been federated, together with a final push from a mass migration should be enough to set Mastodon up as a viable competitor.
Of course this is just about Mastodon/Threads. I think Lemmy could have a different approach if some Reddit alternative wants to federate. This is because Lemmy/Reddit is more about the total content quality (and quantity) rather than who is making that content. With Twitter/Threads/Mastodon most people want to follow specific people. That's why walling the whole Mastodon away from Threads is, imho, a mistake. Of course it's also a mistake that, due to the nature of decentralisation, could practically never happen. There will always be instances that decide to stay federated, even if all the big ones do defederate.
There is one big threat that I do see, and that is if a company would take over the development of activitypub, Lemmy or Mastodon. This should never be allowed to happen as it would allow closing the source, or parts of it, and then just pulling support. As long as the development stays open, the worst that could really happen is that we'd need to move to new instances that do defederate.
But, like, how?
So you’re Meta, and you want to Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish ActivityPub. Maybe you add some new nonstandard feature that’s not compatible with existing Mastodon clients. Annoying, but are people really going to sacrifice everything they like about their favorite client so they can take advantage of some random proprietary feature?
NEVER FORGET XMPP!
Basically Google did to XMPP what Meta will inevitably do to ActivityPub. That’s pretty much the only reason I agree with defederating from Threads.
Concerns about diluting the fediverse with normies are silly, since you can join communities that are interesting to you. And on the whole, a larger population on the fediverse is good for everyone.
Google stopped supporting XMPP, which sucked, but did it have any effects beyond that?
Google’s actions just restored XMPP to the same status it would have been if they’d never supported it in the first place.
This is my take. I honestly don't see how Google didn't just extend XMPP well past when it would have naturally died, and they only pulled the plug when it was clear nothing was going to come of it. I acknowledge that this is an unpopular opinion here, but I feel like that's just because this community is very biased when it comes to this kind of thing.
Xmpp via the jabber app was growing organically as a cross platform chat app with first mover advantage. My take is that google stood on the shoulders of the open source giants and used the early adopter community as a free quality and assurance team for Google talk until they couldn't take any more value (users or q&a volunteering). It is possible that jabber could have declining the whole time but the fact that it still exists and has lasted longer than apps killed by Google means that there is more evidence of it not needing Google.
This entire debate is pointing out a glaring flaw that has been solved in Mastodon but has not yet been introduced to Lemmy, which is the ability as a user to personally filter / block all content from any instance through your account settings rather than having it done at the instance level. I think that were we able to do so at the user level, it would completely abate this entire concern for all but the most stalwart "fuck meta" people.
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