this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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Meta will kill small instances! Please read. (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.

Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.

As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:

  1. Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won't care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
  2. When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won't care. They will use Threads because its faster.

This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.

Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That's not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.

My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.

I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.

We couldn't get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.

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[–] [email protected] 91 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

They shouldn't just defederate from Meta, they should defederate from any other instances that federate with Meta. Like a firewall against late stage capitalism

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

But that is a double-edged sword. What if, for example, mastodon.social doesn't defederate with Meta, but you defederate mastodon.social? Now you've just cut yourself off from a huge portion of the fediverse. Admins should defederate from Meta if their community wants to do that, but defederating from other instances that didn't do that is going a bit too far, in my opinion.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

A small price to pay for salvation from Meta.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've already blocked mastodon.social.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Why? If you have blocked meta shouldn't you already be exempt from seeing comments and posts by their users on other instances? Why is this punitive approach needed

Edit: (Alongside downvoting, an explanation might be better suited to change people's minds, I just eant to know the advantage of this approach since you are excluding yourself from many users and you would have already blocked meta in this scenario)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you have blocked meta shouldn’t you already be exempt from seeing comments and posts by their users on other instances?

Yes, at least that's how it is explained in How the beehaw defederation affects us, Back then, beehaw.org defederated from lemmy.world.

Why do I see posts/comments from beehaw users on communities outside lemmy.world and beehaw.org?

That’s because the “true” version of those posts is outside beehaw. So we get updates from those posts. And lemmy.world didn’t defederate beehaw, so posts/comments from beehaw users can still come to versions hosted on lemmy.world.

The reverse is not true. Because beehaw defederate lemmy.world, any post/comment from a lemmy.world users will NOT be sent to the beehaw version of the post.

Third instance communities

Finally, we have the example of communities that are on instances that have not been defederated by beehaw.org.

We can see all three of these versions look pretty similar. That’s because for the most part they are. We are identical with lemmy.ml, as lemmy.ml hosts the “true” version, and we get all updates from the “true” version. Beehaw.org will not get posts/comments from us, so beehaw actually doesn’t have the most “true” version of this community.

Translated into the current context:

  • beehaw.org = your instance, which defederates from Threads
  • lemmy.world = Threads (sorry folks, just to eplain the mechanics)
  • lemmy.ml = another instance, which is federated with both, your instance and Threads

Conclusions:

  • You wont see posts or commens from Threads users in that remote community. You also won't see reactions to those activities from anyone, anywhere. It's as if comment chains started by Threads users don't exist.
  • Threads will not see posts and comments from you, even if done in communities from instances which are federated with Threads.

Or what do you think, @[email protected]?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using an URL instead of its name, which doesn't work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You'd see comments and posts from their users on other instances that don't block Meta.

It's unclear how many users you would actually exclude, I think a lot of users who are on the fediverse right now don't want to have anything to do with Meta.

As the fediverse grows, there will be different bubbles with not much interaction between those, mainly because some instances won't be moderated while others will try to create discrimination free environments.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Just so I understand, blocking an instance:

Does:

  • block people from that instance from interactinh with yours
  • blocks people from your own indtance being able to search theirs
  • blocks communities from that instance to appear on /all

It doesn't:

  • Block comments if done on non blockef instance
  • Block posts if done on non blocked instance

Is that right? I was under the impression that defederating would block them completely, as that is how it worked over at mastodon, if it doesn't that seems like a serious oversight.