this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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I read your comment before I read the blog post and I have to say, I am finding it hard to align it with what's in the blog.
Aside from the hand-waving comment about XMPP, he does a great job of explaining how everything works, and based on my understanding of the fediverse and its architecture, its all true.
I dont understand what people think should happen here. If a large corporation wants to join, then there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. Its an open protocol. If you want to use Threads, join. If you dont, don't. If you want your server to defederate, tell your admin or join a defederated instance. If you want to federate, tell your admin or join an instance that's federated. If you want to control your own destiny completely, self-host.
There is tons of choice here and the way it's architected, several layers of protection. I dont get this moral panic everyone has. This is quite literally the point of a decentralized social network.
At the end of the day, if a large corporation joining the network, kills it, then it was destined to be destroyed from the beginning.
The problems I personally have with Meta are:
That and basically all the shit big corps do like make people angry and hacking people's brains to stay on the site for as long as fucking possible. Which they are 100% going to try to do here regardless of our intentions.
They can, and are probably already doing, #1 right now. As are Google, Bing, Yandex, Baidu, Apple, DuckDuck, OpenAi, etc. All of the comments and profiles are public information which means literally anyone on the web can see it and do with it. As the blog post says, they don't get anything else though like IP or email--only your home instance gets that. Everything else they can already get with their webcrawlers.
#2. There is no evidence that they plan on doing that. This is a slippery slope argument (which is a logical fallacy). And so what if they do that? Don't join that instance. Migrate to a different instance. Ruud could add ads to lemmy.world today.
#3. Then let those users go. How does that impact you or the fediverse? Are all of your friends on Mastodon or Lemmy now? I seriously doubt it. Do they all need to be? If people leave to go to Threads...then what? They could go to Tildes, Bluesky, or any other service right now. If the service is more appealing and aligns with their values then they'll leave for it (or join it as well). Who cares? The value proposition of the fediverse is that no one entity controls it and you have nearly infinite choice to do whatever the hell you want. Threads may never federate at all. Part of me wonders why they would. Why would they care about the 12M people on mastodon right now vs the 2.3 BILLION instagram users? If they convert 10% of those into Threads users, they'll dwarf Mastodon, so what incentive would they have to federate? It seems like it would be more of a headache for them than a benefit.
You can tilt at every windmill you see or you can enjoy the fediverse and make it a place you and your friends want to spend time.
Can’t make money with the information that is public, they need the social connections to people that will see ads. They want to know our interests, and the interests of all the people we interact with. They don’t give a duck about IPs or emails, they can’t monetize those. So they will keep databases on all users and their connections and their interests all so they can show more appropriate ads. If they’re on the connected fediverse they’ll keep all that too, just in case. And any government can get this info if they ask for it.
#2 there is evidence of them wanting to do that. I’ll look up the thread on mastodon later (I’m on mobile rn).
#3 is a difficult one. I really don’t know why they even want this. I suspected it was to get active users on their initial timeline, but I guess that wasn’t that important to them after all. But there is a real chance of them stopping the growth of the fediverse or even minimizing the size and influence, simply to remove a competitor. Everything is better to them than having users calm down in a relaxing social media environment that is non toxic and could make them all obsolete and kill the whole social media industry’s MO