this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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First of all, this is Meta attempting to co-opt and take over the fediverse.
Second, if I want to see content from my friend's racist grandma I would be on facebook.
Outside of the US everybody is still on Facebook. I used to work on a pretty young company doing work in tech, and all of those guys are active on FB but not on Twitter (or here, for that matter).
I am outside the US. I have to interact with fb for work occasionally, sure. Less frequently these days.
That doesn't mean I need or want Meta all up in my fediverse account, any more than I needed it linked to my reddit. It's just not necessary to do that.
Also outside the US, Facebook has been heavily implicated in incitement to genocide over a period of years. They are not a trustworthy or ethical company.
I mean... I hate to break it to you, but no company is "trustworthy or ethical".
Not under the current set of incentives, not unless forced by regulation.
If the "fediverse" needs unregulated, unsupervised ethical behavior from all participants to survive, it won't survive. Ditto for democracy, for the record.
That's a bit of a false dichotomy.
All companies are not created equal.
Inciting a genocide for years, followed by actively impeding a genocide investigation by the International Criminal Court, that's a really high bar of crappy that not that many will reach.
Not wanting to federate with something like that, is not the same as a demand for ethical purity - that's argumentum ad absurdum.
The fediverse doesn't need to federate with huge multinational for-profit companies that have a proven track record of anti-competitive behaviour. We have much to lose and little to gain.
So that stance effectively becomes a size cap. ActivityPub is free! You can make your instance and join the club! Unless you're big, because we're not selling out and we were here before it was cool.
Hey, don't get me wrong, I'm not here to defend Meta's track record. They are guilty of destroying liberal democracy. But all social media is. I'm not convinced that the iterations of social media hosted currently in the "fediverse" have any in-built safeguards against that beyond being small and mostly made up of like-minded people.
What I'm saying is that the guardrails must be structural and regulatory. I don't care if Meta destroys democracy while federated with Mastodon or stand-alone, I care that they don't destroy democracy and get appropriately punished if they do.