Fediverse

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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:

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.
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] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yes. And it's also not clear how EEE is going to be applied here in this case.

EEE is easy to do when you're adopting something no one uses, like what happened with XMPP.

EEE is not easy to do with something that millions of people use. Look at emails, for example. Emails are still out there.

And let's stick to the example of emails. If every other email server decided to not work with GMail, then 99.99% of users would migrate to GMail and GMail would "win" so hard that emails would cease to exist outside of Google's control.

If you tell people that they can only interact with the hundreds of millions of people out there if they use the popular proprietary tool, they WILL choose the popular proprietary tool. Even if that proprietary tool push hate speech and bad news down their throats. And that's going to kill any chance Mastodon might have had.

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

That's true email is out there, but it's different because it's an protocol like TCP/UDP, HTTP. Federation is the same way, but the fediverse isn't and unlike SMTP the fediverse will be updated and changed frequently. I read another comment which made me think of this a little differently and now I'm maybe less against, more middle. Luckily we have a living experiment with Lemmy.ml and lemmy.world to see how this pans out.