I cam here to get away from all the corporate BS, but suddenly people want to welcome Facebook/Meta to the fediverse? I cannot fathom how people see their intentions as pure or innocent, especially since they aim to profit off of the open source software everyone has worked so hard on.
I just don’t see how the fediverse survives if it decides to let these massive companies make their instances. It feels like it’ll be a repeat of the rise of social media, where all the smaller forms got wiped out by large, consolidated social media platforms.
I think the situation should be monitored and we should take a “wait and see” approach.
Likely, it will end up like all of Meta’s other products but, that said, I do think a place to easily communicate with a large population isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
I see introducing a bigger group of people to how decentralization works is an ultimately good thing but Meta has history of being untrustworthy.
I’m obviously conflicted about it so I’d just like to see what happens and make a decision with as much information as possible.
I honestly see no harm in assuming that Threads is a harmful actor, defederating, and if they prove they aren’t then we can easily federate again. Same wait-and-see approach. It’s no problem to switch from defederated to federated.
It’s just incredibly more likely that it is harmful, thus when using “wait and see” we should be on the default side of whatever that implies while waiting, which in this case is being defederated.
This is absolutely the right approach. Facebook’s reputation should be enough on its own for us to defederate.
If by some miracle, it eventually looks like it’s on the level, that’s when discussions of federation should start.
What we really want is for all the platforms such as Meta, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and any other you can think of, to get out of their silos. Let the content flow and you choose what you subscribe to. Maybe it will be the Fediverse, or maybe something like Nostr, which I think is even better since it incorporates the concept of validating the author of anything. Hopefully, the Fediverse incorporates that concept of validating the author, even if only the clients do it.