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 peppy@lemmy.world to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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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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[–] menemen@lemmy.world 107 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Please: Everyone read this piece about how "Embrace, extend and destroy" can destroy a federated network. It happened before and they certainly will try to do it with the fediverse.

Big corpos don't want to take it over, they want it gone.

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

[–] astral_avocado@lemmynsfw.com 30 points 1 year ago

Damn, that's a terrifying vision of the future. I was on the fence with defederating, but we probably should.

Your comment should be top.

[–] zeppo@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

Absolutely. We'd have to be nuts to think they're not trying to take it over and ruin it.

[–] drdaeman@lemmy.zhukov.al 11 points 1 year ago

I don't think XMPP comparison is correct.

First, in my personal (subjective!) opinion, XMPP died because of entirely different primary reason: it, by design, had trouble working on mobile devices. Keeping the connection was either battery-expensive or outright impossible, and using OS native push notifications had significant barriers.

As for Google Talk - it just came and went. Because they never had proper MUCs (multi user conferences, think communities), in my own (again, personal, thus subjective - not objective!) experience it was quite the opposite to how the article paints it. Whoever participated in chatrooms I've been in, and had used a Google account, hated Google's decision and moved to XMPP. I'm no fond of Google, but their impact on XMPP was not strictly negative - they contributed some useful XEPs and useful free software libraries after all. Although, of course, for those who used XMPP primarily as a classic messenger system (like MSN, AIM or ICQ) for private 1:1 chats things surely looked differently.

Now, why I think the comparison is not correct. I think Threads' situation is different because of fundamental differences in how those systems operate. And not in favor of Threads/Meta. If Threads would be Lemmy or XMPP MUC-like system (that is, having communities/groups hosted on particular servers), then it would be a complicated story, where Fediverse could even theoretically score a net win. But as I get it, Threads is Mastodon/Twitter-like thing, and their users' content will stay with Meta, entirely at Meta's discretion whenever they let other systems access it, and when they pull the plug. Given that Meta is also not likely to contribute to FLOSS Fediverse projects, their Fediverse presence is of questionable benefits to say the least.

[–] ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Fantastic read. Thanks for the link.