yarn

You say you understand my point about the threat of Meta consuming the entirety of the fediverse, but then you talk about privacy, which is completely irrelevant to my point. What does privacy matter when Meta gains 95% share of the fediverse communities and then closes them off to only Threads users? In that situation, your privacy is completely gone. You have to join Threads to get back in to the old fediverse that Meta took away.

You're not understanding that growth on fediverse instances run by Meta is ultimately bad for the fediverse in the long run.

Let me try explaining like this: Imagine there's an instance called meta.world and it gets hugely popular. Whenever you browse the all feed, it seems like 95% of the posts are from meta.world. Everybody hates that it ended up this way, and everybody tried to fight it, but it just inevitably happened because Meta has the fastest and most stable servers, and because there are a ton of funny users on Threads who only post to meta.world because Threads heavily favors those communities in their app. Then one day Meta decides that they don't want to support the fediverse anymore, so they close off access to meta.world. So effectively 95% of the "fediverse" as we knew it vanishes, and you have to join Threads if you want access to those communities again.

It's the threat of that scenario that has a lot of people wanting to block Meta from the start.

It depends on how many communities are on Meta's instances. Imagine if a year from now, Meta's instances are all the rage. It's like lemmy.world on crack, where 95% of the communities you see browsing all are from meta.world. Everybody hates that it ended up this way, but that's just the way it shook out because Meta has the best performing servers and a huge population of shitposters on Threads creating funny memes who probably don't even know instances besides meta.world even exist.

But then Meta decides they're done with the fediverse and decides to close off access to meta.world. Now 95% of the fediverse is effectively vanished, and you either have to switch to Threads to regain access to those communities, or you have to stay on the 5% of the fediverse that's still left and basically start from scratch all over again.

I quit reddit for a whole two years at one point. It obviously didn't work out forever, evidenced by the fact that I'm here right now. But when I did quit, I found that it sucked for the first two weeks or so, but once I started to forget about the finer details of reddit and things like that, then I just stopped caring. It's like you start to forget about what you're missing out on after a little while, or you get used to missing out and just stop caring.

So that's what I would recommend. Try quitting cold turkey and being disciplined about not checking YouTube for at least two weeks. See if the same thing happens to you, where you just get used to missing out and stop caring.

The argument for defederating is that Meta has an enormous technological and userbase advantage for capturing up all the activity in the fediverse. It's not out of the realm of possibility that the overwhelming majority of future activity on the fediverse happens on Meta controlled instances, if we let them have free reign capturing as much of the fediverse as they can. In that case, with Meta effectively controlling the fediverse, then they don't really need to play nice anymore. They can introduce a breaking API change and hold all of the non-Meta instances ransom saying to upgrade to their new API, or you won't be able to participate with their fediverse communities anymore.

So it's basically a question of do we nip the Meta issue in the bud and preemptively defederate from them, or do we wait until they take over and force us to restart from scratch two years from now.

I agree. The less flair, the better, imo. Ideally, I would like it to stay as it is now, where your username and avatar are the only reputational markers, and upvotes and downvotes are only officially tracked on a per post basis. If you want to increase your reputation, then put out quality posts that make people remember your username.

Any other additional flair/reputation trackers besides that incentivise low effort posts. Those posts are entertaining, don't get me wrong, but it would be nice to see how lemmy evolves without directly incentivising them.

Edit: wording

That YSK thread from yesterday inspired me to create a new account with an anonymous relay email, instead of my personal email. I'm not sure how much I would've actually had to worry about if I kept using my personal email, but I figure it's better to be safe than sorry.

I also probably could've just changed the email in my first account instead of creating a brand new account, but I don't really know how data is persisted or anything. That was another case of better to be safe than sorry.