this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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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.