Normal people, and society in general, are often scary and reckless with their use of technology. Like, they expect it to single-handedly solve all problems, or they expect evil scientists to doom us all, or they take technologies which are in reality designed by highly intelligent and well-intentioned people to be part and parcel of a plot to turn us all into slaves or kill us all, or they fall for scammers using technobabble. Normal people mostly don’t know about FOSS or have a firm grasp on the ethics or the practical consequences that computer technology has on society.
Facebook, while it is a technology company and therefore it knows more about technology, is also a part of normal society, it has some of the scary recklessness of normal people with regards to technology, and it is likely to interact with very large numbers of non-technical people. That unpredictability does not seem to be favorable to a small platform like programming.dev - this site’s probably pretty fragile to other people making rash decisions with technology. I don’t know the details, but I imagine things are better, but maybe not better enough for other, larger Lemmy instances, due to limitations on developer time. If a small part of a big company decides to start making problems, they might be able to cause big problems.
I don’t see a way to dramatically tilt the odds of that unpredictability being a positive thing in favor of this site or FOSS as a whole by integrating with them - it doesn’t seem to grant Lemmy instances any leverage over them. Their goodwill is of dubious value - they were already likely to try to roll over Lemmy if it ever seemed to them to be convenient for them, which it very easily could become, and giving instances the option of defederating doesn’t seem like it should upset them too too much or give them a cover to do mean things to mess up the platform.
So yes, I’m pro-defederation.
I expect people will wonder where I’m coming from with this huge block of text, because I think people tend to assume that when people use a lot of words, they either know a lot, are an idiot, or are trying to trick them. I’d say that this is situation fits none of those three categories. I think a lot about stuff like computer ethics, so that’s why I’m being so wordy about this - but I’m not speaking out of practical experience. My experience is talking with mostly non-technical family, reading the news, reading r/programming before the blackout and programming.dev now, trying to get into programming and mostly failing due to lack of mental energy, and thinking about technology a lot in my free time.
Normal people, and society in general, are often scary and reckless with their use of technology. Like, they expect it to single-handedly solve all problems, or they expect evil scientists to doom us all, or they take technologies which are in reality designed by highly intelligent and well-intentioned people to be part and parcel of a plot to turn us all into slaves or kill us all, or they fall for scammers using technobabble. Normal people mostly don’t know about FOSS or have a firm grasp on the ethics or the practical consequences that computer technology has on society.
Facebook, while it is a technology company and therefore it knows more about technology, is also a part of normal society, it has some of the scary recklessness of normal people with regards to technology, and it is likely to interact with very large numbers of non-technical people. That unpredictability does not seem to be favorable to a small platform like programming.dev - this site’s probably pretty fragile to other people making rash decisions with technology. I don’t know the details, but I imagine things are better, but maybe not better enough for other, larger Lemmy instances, due to limitations on developer time. If a small part of a big company decides to start making problems, they might be able to cause big problems.
I don’t see a way to dramatically tilt the odds of that unpredictability being a positive thing in favor of this site or FOSS as a whole by integrating with them - it doesn’t seem to grant Lemmy instances any leverage over them. Their goodwill is of dubious value - they were already likely to try to roll over Lemmy if it ever seemed to them to be convenient for them, which it very easily could become, and giving instances the option of defederating doesn’t seem like it should upset them too too much or give them a cover to do mean things to mess up the platform.
So yes, I’m pro-defederation.
I expect people will wonder where I’m coming from with this huge block of text, because I think people tend to assume that when people use a lot of words, they either know a lot, are an idiot, or are trying to trick them. I’d say that this is situation fits none of those three categories. I think a lot about stuff like computer ethics, so that’s why I’m being so wordy about this - but I’m not speaking out of practical experience. My experience is talking with mostly non-technical family, reading the news, reading r/programming before the blackout and programming.dev now, trying to get into programming and mostly failing due to lack of mental energy, and thinking about technology a lot in my free time.