this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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A good response. Civlised and to-the-point.
I disagree.
I hope there'll be people discussing sensibly.
For example the question how the rest of the fediverse would like Meta to act, when / if they have the by far largest instance on Fediverse with Threads.
Should they Rate-Limit queries from their users to other Instances, as to not overload them? This would protect other instances, but make the federated experience worse, driving more people to threads.
Would the Fediverse rather that Meta mirrors images etc on their servers too, or pull those from the original server?
Maybe they have UX ideas that would be useful to have somewhat uniform (like the subreddit/community/magazine stuff here), and would like input on them.
Of course just blocking them is an option for the fediverse, but doing that blindly seems like a missed opportunity for both sides.
More freely available content would be great, wouldn't it?
Maybe they have Ideas on the protocol, that they want to talk with admins about as a first step to gain more perspective. And certainly they are likely to be data-hungry greedy shit, but there is a chance that they are actually good ideas - there are actual people working at meta after all.
There's tons of ways in which this could be useful, and I don't really understand the completely blocking approach I see a lot of.
They want to use ActivityPub, that's awesome, finally something new and big that uses an open freaking standard on the web. What are the downsides? If it sucks for communities they can easily block Meta.
Yes, Meta is not a Company working for the betterment of the world, certainly.
But maybe, just maybe, goals align here, and Meta can make money and improve the Fediverse and the Internet with it. And certainly, maybe they want to "take over" ActivityPub, and that would indeed be bad. And even then, wouldn't knowing because they told you be much better than knowing because they're meta?
So, if they want to change the Protocol, be very, very wary of their proposals. But even there there they could just want reasonable improvements because they suddenly deal with 100x of the next biggest instances.
tl;dr: when you tell people what you'd like them to do, it increases the chances of them doing that.
I doubt most people moved to the fediverse simple because of better content. Personally I didn't. And quantity doesn't mean quality.
Contributions are open for these people. But the moment the contributions are facilitated through Meta, they represent Metas business interests.
Control. Meta could swamp the fediverse and just because its open source the current platforms wouldnt necessarily continue to exist in the same way they currently do. We could see even bigger fragmentation or breaks, some Admins might feel forced to federate with Metas service, leading to the currently existing community breaking up.
Imo the last years has proven, without a doubt, that those things simply do not align.
To conclude: We have seen these things before and they havent ended well. People here seem to undererstimate the power Meta has and the impact that this power has. Even if all current instances were to defederate from Meta, simple association, user demand caused by an influx of Meta users and hard to guess power dynamics would make the fediverse a far different place than it currently is. To make a comparison: you cant drop the gravity well of a black hole into a small, complex planetary system and expect it to be unaffected.