this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
1355 points (94.4% liked)

Fediverse

28490 readers
725 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] IAccidentallyCame@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Meta and other big for profit players in social media have a bad history. Privacy, ads, profits at all cost. The people concerned about this early on are basing it off the previous behaviors of these companies.

I feel like it's a good and early immune response.

[–] problematicconsumer@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If it's not technically possible for them to show me ads, see my ip, private messages etc how is this harmful?

[–] IAccidentallyCame@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm thinking in terms of the future.They'll have profit incentives to find ways acquire whatever data they can profit from. While they may not be able to do certain things now, companies like this chip away bit by bit in the long term.

With their incentives, resources, and prior behavior, I'm not certain what they can add would be worth whatever the positive result of their profit making activity.

Edits: spelling.