this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Personally I think it's a test to see if the fediverse has the legs to stand on. I dont think we will see an internet in the future that exists without corporation run social media and blocking them before they even launch is against what the fediverse is for
Now if they have rampant content moderation problems and degrade the site then sure block them but I think they should be treated the same as any other fediverse site
A week or more ago when I first learned of Meta's project my immediate gut reaction was to defederate, because fuck them. And that attitude is understandable by anyone who is on Lemmy out of grievances with Reddit or corporate tech or whatever. But when I then tried to think more about the actual reasons why the Fediverse would be worse off with Meta participating, it's not that simple.
The privacy concerns immediately fall apart when you realize Meta doesn't have to have their brand-name service to get access to everything going across ActivityPub. Literally anyone can spin up an instance and has access to everything. You will never stop them. In fact, they probably already have instances on the network.
From a technical standpoint you could be concerned about the amount of data that will flow into the network from such a product. From what (little) I understand about federation, it's a peer-to-peer system that naturally births incredible amounts of data duplication, so the performance hit from Threads coming online will certainly be felt. But, if you're already ok with the idea of the Fediverse growing organically, it will eventually face those problems anyway and so now's as good a time as any to solve them.
So it seems it may come down to what kind of community do you want embodied by the Fediverse? Facebook-quality content just seems disgusting to me, but the users posting that stuff can always just join Lemmy outside the bounds of Meta products. So I'm kind of landing in the same space with your quote; this is a test to see if what is happening here is really something that is more than just anti-Reddit posturing and will stand on its own over time. If it is, it will exist alongside Threads and will not be muscled out, and that will be great.
I think the one thing that would really give me pause and would motivate me to fight against it is if Meta gets a presence in the WWWC or whoever it is that governs ActivityPub and begins to influence it's direction. Then we might see a Google-Kills-XMPP story play out again. They will certainly want to integrate new features into ActivityPub... namely, advertising. And it's all downhill from there.
Very well written response. I appreciate it.
It will be interesting to see how much growth will remain thats not just anti-twitter anti-reddit users willing to momentarily move out of spite and will remain here in the long term.
I really hope ActivityPub/WWWC does not get overrun with corporate interests but only time will tell