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 more concerned of them integrating new features and bullying everyone else into following to integrate them or else.
“We have to defederate or else they’ll run incompatible code that won’t let us federate with them”
This seems like a self-solving problem to me, I still don’t understand what the hyperventilation is about.
They won’t do that until after absorbing the users. Much like how Reddit killed off almost all internet forums.
You really think Facebook is gonna poach users from the Fediverse, people who are explicitly here because we don’t want to be on Facebook/Twitter/etc? C’mon. This isn’t a realistic outcome.
Yes of course I do. Almost everyone here is still using corporate social media while also using fediverse, side by side, I wager you’ve looked at something corporate today. Why? Because fediverse does not have everything that they want to consume on a day to day basis.
Creating enclosures where that content exists pulls the users over because they can not get it anywhere else.
Let’s say you cook a meal, fish and potatoes. You get your fish from the river (publicly available) but the potatoes are only being grown on the corporate land. You are forced to get it from there, so you begrudgingly do because you want your full meal obviously.
Later on they find a way to enclose some of the fish too, and eventually all of it, removing it from the public space. The fediverse still exists, but it’s a shell without anything you want on it. You begrudginingly go to the corporation’s space for it.
People want their content, and enclosing on public commons by walling off that content is easy to do bit by bit, like thinly slicing a salami until it’s all gone. People will even defend against it and pretend that it’s not going to happen, like right now.
This analogy doesn’t make sense. How are they gonna take what we already have and enclose it away from us? We run the servers, not them.
If they close it off again, we go back to how things are now. Which we’re all clearly fine with, because we’re already here. Are they gonna hypnotize us on the way out and lead us pied piper style?
So did internet forums. Where are they these days? Oh, they all became subreddits as users moved away to the convenience of reddit.
They will find a way to drown everything through big-data analysis if you give them even the slightest bit of leeway. They must be treated as a completely hostile bad-actor because that is precisely what they are.
Moving from isolated forums to an aggregate community is a huge quality of life change. We’re talking about them convincing people who are already on the Fediverse to move to their Fediverse server, which is a side grade, offered to people who almost all hate Facebook already. There’s no hook there, and nobody has given me an even slightly plausible pathway that’ll convince anybody to move over. There’s just vague gesturing and unspoken implications.
Nobody here wants to use their server. We all know how bad they are. We’re here because of them. But suddenly a nonspecific siren call is gonna move us all over? It just doesn’t make sense. I can think of plausible ways we can gain users from this. I can’t find any plausible way to lose users or cause damage to the Fediverse that doesn’t involve mind control.
There are thousands of ways to create a hook.
Here’s a piss easy one I’ll just fire off the cuff, access to the official community for Call of Duty 41 or whatever number they’re at these days requires an account, but don’t worry we’ve made a sweet deal for these 3 custom skins you can get!
Whoops, now the entire call of duty community is on their platform, and regularly logs in using their platform because they get content through it. In partnership with Twitch or some shit I don’t know.
“Oh since I’m already logged in with this account I’ll just use this w/e” happens, and suddenly convenience is causing them to use it more and more and more to just browse the rest of fediverse through it, and over time you find they participate just a little bit less everywhere else, bit by bit, optimised through A/B testing and big-data on Meta’s side, until it’s all them.
You have to establish a culture of complete hostility to them from the outset or they will find ways. It’s really not difficult to think up incentives, nor is it difficult to pay influencers in different audience sectors one by one. Things need to be so unrelentingly hostile to them that even incentives, people they’re fans of, and every other method under the sun all becomes uninteresting to people. If you give them even one single inch they will take everything.
Facebook and Instagram killed off the forums I used. I was highly involved with a niche art independent website forum which was pretty well known to people within the community, and then right around the time average people really started using the internet, Facebook boomed and then Instagram. Using those got huge within the community. The corresponding sub on reddit has never amounted to much at all.
Sorry to hear that. Art and photography definitely had a stronger time on platforms like insta, tumblr, and twitter, where the artists felt they were more directly benefitting and growing their presence and audience. It was more so the discussion-based forums that reddit killed.
Not sure how you’d go about building Lemmy in a way that appeals to them. Perhaps if profiles could be posted to and profiles functioned like communities that could be subscribed to, then users could subscribe directly to artists reddit sort of half-heartedly did this but never really made it very visible that you could directly follow a user and never promoted that content via the “follow” feature. Something like that could be done for Lemmy. A feed of your direct user/author subscriptions. This could however create a power-user problem.
Or else what? I guess they can’t do much?
“Join our fed or this code in the post body will not work for you”
I don’t care about their code in the post body. If there’s a possibility I just block the whole instance. Don’t want to see anything from them.
You missed the point. Let me rephrase.
They coule add features that makes their instance/own client add things to posts, that don’t work in other clients/instances properly.
This in effect could get some users who just don’t care about avoiding meta, and also FOMO type of users, to switch.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t care, but it’s bad for Lemmy.
I don’t really see how this is bad for Lemmy. Let me rephrase what I said as well:
Let them add those features. People who use metas instance wouldn’t have come to Lemmy in the first place. The users who “just don’t care avoiding meta” aren’t on here now (maybe there’s a miniscule amount that’s how I see it). They will come when this threads thing properly rolls out. In my opinion Lemmy won’t significantly change when this happens since people who wanted to stay on reddit did and those who are here now are trying out the better Boss way of living and probably won’t switch to meta as soon as it comes out. Therefore this won’t cause any trouble. Just block the meta instance “out of sight out of mind”.
Imagine hanging out with a group of friends and someone from outside starts harassing you and that person really doesn’t like you. Are you going to start hanging out with them? Obviously not. Just chill with your friends and don’t mind them. Nothing about your friends is going to change.
I doubt that someone who got used to the free libre FOSS style of life and really enjoys it would switch to meta. No clue what meta would have to offer to them to switch. I think its easier to switch in the other direction.
I feel like it’d be the other way around honestly. Maybe I’m just shilling but right now the app is literally barebones as shit and it looks and feels like it was made in a week.