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.
Imo the fediverse should not try to compete with the big commercial networks on their terms. It will be much healthier when it grows slow and steady with people who want to be here because it is the fediverse. A place of freedom and lack of controlling evil players who will use your data to control your behavior (to get more ad revenue or worse, to make you act against your best interests, such as happened on facebook with Cambridge Analytica).
We’re not gonna win from big dollars and vested interests. Let’s not play their game. Let them play their game and let us be a safe haven for anyone who is done with being a pawn in that game.
The fediverse is already a really nice place to be. You don’t need 100s of millions of users to have the network effect that creates a successful platform. We’ve already reached that critical mass.