this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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Why are fediverse admins blocking out threads? (reddthat.com)
submitted 1 year ago by dartos@reddthat.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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I get meta evil, but aren’t we just blocking out any users from accessing the wider fediverse?

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[–] dartos@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But that’s the situation currently anyway.

They are still the largest fediverse platform.

Like to your points

  1. Sure, but now those people just won’t join the fediverse
  2. How do you figure? What persona of user is there that would have joined an independent instance but join threads instead? The fediverse itself has no draw, besides being more independent.
  3. And that’s different than now, how? Every fediverse platform is essentially implementing features that large social media giants have had for years.
  4. This is true, but what’s the problem with that? Most fediverse users were accustomed to large amounts of content from other platforms and left (or at least also use the fediverse) the only downside would be giving meta more data, but they can just scrape that same data from the fediverse anyway. All they need to do is quietly set up a private instance and set a bot account on that instance to follow everything from every instance it could find.

Someone in another thread mentioned that they would likely display ads near content from independent instances, and that’s a good point imo. They’d be directly making a profit off of private instances, which would be fucked up.

I hear a lot of talk of EEE too, which is a legitimate worry also. there must be a way to accept the first 2 Es without the extinguish. I’m hoping the admin community is thinking about that more than “meta evil” when defederating threads.

[–] ZagTheRaccoon@reddthat.com 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

What I am describing is how EEE would apply in this context. Decenterlized spaces can be undermined by corperate power becoming the supermajority, subsuming the spaces valuable users and content, and then walling themselves off causing people to abandon the original project as their social graph has once again become held hostage to the users the super instance has. We already see this here with Beehave de-federating from Lemmy.World. Lemmy.World holds most of the content, so losing access to that harms the smaller instance tremendously more than the largest instance, because they've become reliant on that content. Arguing that Meta is not a threat to the fedeverse for this reason is suggesting that decentralization isn't necesary, because they are 30 times larger than the entirety of mastodon combined. It will be centralization on a whole nother scale to anything we've seen so far here. And this is literally how EEE works to undermine decenterlized networks strengths, which rests in not having all the power held in one instances hands.

Your counterpoints make just as much sense in the other EEE spaces. Why didn't they just keep doing what they were doing after google walled them off? Why did they largely abandon the decenterlized space and follow the supermajority that held all the users they grew accustomed to interacting with?

The reality is that this is what happened. I can't really debate with you about this because it's not just prediction, this has an existing history of happening. I hope you're right, but the record so far does not agree with you.

Luckily, we’ll find out not too long from now. Hope you’re right.