this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Personally, I'm not planning on using the Meta service, but I'm not a fan of pre-emptive defederation either. The vast majority of P92 users will have 0 clue what federation/activitypub is, let alone actually log into Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin, etc. For them, they will forever think of themselves as @username, not @username.
I'm totally fine with Meta releasing an app who's posts are exposed via ActivityPub, along with being able to consume other posts via ActivityPub. If anything, I would like to think it'll drive more people off the Meta platform and into Mastodon, as moving to a federated app doesn't mean they have to completely break connections with their network on-platform with Meta.
Overall, I'm more in favour of allowing a personal user to choose to defederate from specific instances, because regardless of what happens, if Meta joins, there will be other companies getting on the bandwagon, and endlessly splitting up based of which instances federate with which others will eventually lead to the whole damn thing falling apart and the big players becoming the de-jure instances anyways.
I mean, the vast majority of Lemmy/Kbin users migrated from Reddit, as did the vast majority of Mastodon users from Twitter. I'm fine with keeping things open to help facilitate more user growth to community run instances, while also having a place for the less tech-savvy to get their feet wet.
I think this is the logical pragmatic take. They'll start on day 1 with more users than the entirety of the fediverse. Defederating just allows them to ignore us and pretend they own the fediverse. We should at least try to win over those users and prevent FB adware software overtaking Mastodon as the dominant fediverse platform.
I don't understand why people think the end goal should be one network of Fediverse instances connected to each other. We already don't have that and never will.
Meta adding "more users than the entirety of the Fediverse" is irrelevant. They already have more users and content from Facebook, Instagram or whatever else Meta owns is not showing up on my Lemmy or Kbin front page. How would I notice any difference if the tech behind Meta's services is different?
If Meta wants a platform that's larger than anything else they already have Facebook.
The one and only reason Meta's looking at the fediverse is to scrape it for content. It's social content they risk being left out of and they want in. It's as simple as that.
Federate with their instances and they will scrape the shit out of yours, build shadow profiles around your users, feed all your posts and comments into their LLM, cross reference them with their Facebook data to figure out everybody's real identity, and so on and so forth.
Nope
This is how they destroy competition that they can’t buy out.
Microsoft did it with office, intell did it to amd
Their network can’t survive a competitor, they depend on no other option existing
Guaranteed this is about disrupting and controlling the federated network
I like to think they see the rapid growth as an opportunity to grab some Reddit refugees. I'm not sure they see the Fediverse as a viable threat YET. They could hedge it though and try to snuff it out while they still can.