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.

  • PeanutsHere@lemmy.worldEnglish
    192·
    1 year ago

    I don’t exactly understand how this is going to kill small instances? I just stared with the Fediverse stuff so I might have understood it wrong:

    Point 1: “Meta will unethically defederate from instances…” I’m assuming that means they’ll block access to those instances for anyone that has an account on the Meta instance? I don’t really see the problem with that. This won’t affect small instances at all because people who want to view other instances will have an account somewhere else and people using the meta instance probably wouldn’t have heard of the fediverse in the first place if it wasn’t for meta. Its a win basically since they’ll get introduced to the fediverse concept which is a step in the right direction. And small instances will stay as they are which is unaffected.

    Point 2: If I understood it correctly they can only slow down access to other instances if one uses an account created on the meta instance? So same argument as in point 1.

    • Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.worldEnglish
      143·
      1 year ago

      There is a LOT of fear mongering around this. And basically everyone loves to cite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

      And theoretically, that CAN happen. But… looking at the examples, the only time it ever actually happened was instant messaging which very clearly died because the vast majority of people don’t consider a desktop client to be the primary interface to a chat system these days. But most of that is just based on Microsoft of the 90s and… a lot of that was early internet propaganda coupled with courts ruling on concepts they barely understood.

      Going through their examples (and then one of my own)

      • Browser Incompatibilities: Ask any web developer. All browsers suck. The only reason life has gotten somewhat decent is that just about everyone is built on chromium these days… and EVERYONE hates chromium. Safari is still batshit insane.
      • Office Documents: As someone who has used star/open/libre office for over twenty years now (ugh…). It may have been true that not being specifically doc or xls would screw you over. And it did, but that was more because of licensed fonts that all documents were based around. But these days? Libre has no issue opening the vast majority of docx/xlsx files, google docs works great, etc. It may not have been a good path to a standard, but we actually have standards now… that those of us who like latex/beamer still get grumpy about
      • Java: Java is dead outside of legacy systems for very good reasons. But almost all of that boils down to companies wanting to use the new hotness and standards committees generally not having the resources or the know-how to optimize per platform. And they shouldn’t. No matter what language you are using, you eventually get to the point of “I can use an open platform agnostic library and get 75% of performance or I can use this platform specific one that will give the vast majority of my customers 100% of performance”. Which is software engineering
      • Instant Messaging: I am not even sure what the argument here is. MS didn’t maintain compatibility with AIM? They’re all dead in favor of imessage and whatsapp and google’s thin layer of paint over jabber. And pretty much every major gaming related IM is built on top of IRC at this point?
      • E-Mail: I will fully admit to hating office 365. But corporate IT tend to lock down everything regardless of what provider/software they use. And if it isn’t locked down? Odds are that is just because the IT guy uses it and their boss doesn’t know that exists.
      • WSL: I genuinely have no idea what the complaint is here
      • iMessage: This is my favorite example and probably the closest to actually succeeding at this in the software space. It sort of started as a meme but has waves of being increasingly real. Apple, for Reasons, use this to basically make Not Apple (so Android) a plague upon society because it ruins all the wonderful benefits of imessage and blah blah blah. Which largely has killed SMS for anyone I interact with for more than a few dates. But it isn’t like I am selling my android to get an iphone. We just both choose to use a third party app instead. Gotta love that third or fourth date “So… that was fun and I really liked what you did with your mouth. By the way, what are your thoughts on Signal versus Whatsapp?”

      Do I think facebook et al will kill “The Fediverse”: Maybe. But that will be because we’ll finally stress test things and find all those issues and determine what is a fundamental flaw versus something updatable. But I would rather use a good product/software than get cranky that one specific protocol/implementation which is demonstrably inferior got pushed out. Because it isn’t like all open source office suites died the moment people realized how dogshit of an experience openoffice was. Iterations and forks were made and libre office is now REALLY good. And so is google drive and online MS office and so forth.

      Because, again, look at Microsoft. Yes, there was a time where it looked like internet explorer was going to take over the planet. And, in some ways, it did. But it was a piece of shit and even at the time we knew netscape sort of existed (and eventually became Firefox?). And as more and more people ran into issues, more and more alternatives gained a foothold. And we are seeing this happen again as chromium’s well known performance issues coupled with google’s bias against ad blocking have led to a resurgence of Firefox and massive pushes by Opera (which is still chromium but…) to market themselves as the alternative that Michael Reeves uses.

      • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.worldEnglish
        65·
        1 year ago

        Do I think facebook et al will kill “The Fediverse”: Maybe. But that will be because we’ll finally stress test things and find all those issues and determine what is a fundamental flaw versus something updatable. But I would rather use a good product/software than get cranky that one specific protocol/implementation which is demonstrably inferior got pushed out.

        This just means that you’re not really here for the stated purpose of fediverse (to create a digital commons) you’re here for an alternative to reddit. You don’t care if it’s centralised and in the hands of one person or not, you’re just mad at what reddit did.

        What this misses is that reddit didn’t do what it did just because Spez is a meanie. It did what it did because it’s what EVERY capitalist would have done in the run up to IPO.

        What you miss here is that you’re just advocating for exactly the same conditions that caused what you didn’t like. And for some reason you don’t think those conditions would re-create exactly the same outcome in future.

        You fail to understand that these outcomes are not the project of individuals with the wrong ideas. They are systemic issues and the entire point of fediverse is to subvert that system and the many problems it creates.

        • Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.worldEnglish
          6·
          1 year ago

          No. I am here to “create a digital commons”. I have felt that has been something that has been lost since the usenet days and even checked out lemmy a year or so ago and thought it wasn’t up to snuff.

          The thing is: I don’t care if that is lemmy, mastodon, or even the fediverse as we know it. I care that it is something that can handle (distributed) load and provide the UI/UX needs to actually be something people would use.

          Which is exactly my point. In almost every case of Evil Microsoft Killing Everything, it mostly just boils down to people learning what they do and don’t want over time. And, in a lot of those cases, actual open source solutions eventually emerged out of the wreckage of the failed projects.

          You accuse me of “advocating for exactly the same conditions” when, if anything, that is on you. Because so many people refuse to leave twitter because “nothing else is better” or “I am too stupid to understand a domain name” and so forth. Just like they don’t want to leave reddit because not-reddit is not-reddit. That applies to The Fediverse too. Maybe, while stress testing it, we find out there are serious fundamental issues. We can either insist everyone needs to stick with Mastodon/Lemmy/whatever or we can look at forks and even new projects with similar goals.

          And, eventually, those new projects will actually achieve the goal. Or we’ll all be dead from nuclear winter. One or the other.

          • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.worldEnglish
            45·
            1 year ago

            it mostly just boils down to people learning what they do and don’t want over time

            Lmao, this “individual responsibility” shit is just you regurgitating Ayn Rand/Thatcherite bollocks. “Oh the corporations became the overseers of everything simply because they made a better product” is such an utterly house-broken and naive mindset. “Ohhh you just need to make a better product and then you’ll magically beat them, wink wink”.

            It is extremely rare that I see someone this housebroken.

            • Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.worldEnglish
              6·
              1 year ago

              No. You need both opportunity and a better product.

              Reddit shitting the bed was the opportunity that led to lemmy exploding in popularity. Time will tell if it is a better product. I am pretty open that I think lemmy will be a flash in the pan this time, but we might have something “take over” when the actual IPO happens.

              Twitter shitting the bed was the opportunity for mastodon and cohost and the like to explode in popularity. Mastodon did, to a much lesser extent, but there was a minor hiccup on sign up that led most users to refusing to try it (and, odds are, a lot of that was propaganda from facebook et al to buy time). So it likely won’t take over. And cohost… is a text heavy version of tumblr. In 2023. I like it but…

              But hey, got it. Anyone out there who doesn’t care about their experience at all and only care if something has the right branding makes them a right wing lunatic in your eyes. Good luck with that.

              • Lenins2ndCat@lemmy.worldEnglish
                24·
                1 year ago

                “Opportunity” lmao. Someone works in tech, and can’t stop themselves using corporate office speak in an anti-corporate conversation. You sound like you’re giving a whiteboard presentation.