When I joined the fediverse I was told that its decentralised nature made it impossible for a big corporation to take it over. Then why are people so afraid of Meta?
I didn't come here to be isolated from the outside world. I just don't want to be controlled by one single corporate entity.
But some activists seem to think we should build a different kind of wall and be hostile to anything "commercial".
@aristeon89. It's not impossible for a big corporation to ruin it for the rest of us. Let's say Meta makes a new, federated platform called facegram, and uses Activity Pub to connect to the fediverse. Facegram ropes in millions of users who now enjoy interacting with the fediverse. BUT facegram users can't switch out of facegram without losing their followers. Facegram has "extras" that only work well with facegram users and when free options are put on the fediverse, facegram finds ways to break compatibility. facegram users will have an algorithmic feed so they won't get to see everything we post in their feed.
I am not making up these kinds of problems that have come up when the free internet tries to play nice with the money machines.
@killick but the people who don't want facegram still have their own instances, and they can choose to defederate if facegram makes the experience bad for the rest of us. Which at least gives us some leverage, and can ignite some conversations.
How is preemptive defederation and isolation any better?
I'm not sure how relevant previous examples are, because this dynamic has never been tested with regards to social media.
@killick I don't think the article explains anything specifically and it betrays its ideological orientation by framing the issue as a struggle between "capitalists" and its opponents.
I most certainly don't want to be walled in by people who have a certain ideology and are already trying to make this space hostile to those who don't conform. I am not against capitalism.
Again, the fediverse cannot be taken over, and no precedent exists as to social media.
@aristeon89 There are arguments and examples in the past such as Google joing xmpp but then once integrated, purposely making so many changes it slowed the free version development as they tried to keep relevant with Google and became a non competor until Google dropped them. Also worried about algorithm culture coming over here even if by proxy, but it looks we don't have a choice at this point.
@anubis2814 I agree about the algorithm culture, but theoretically every instance could implement algorithms, and there's been talk about it on Mastodon already. Btw, Mastodon will implement quote posts, which I don't like. So, this stuff is already happening.
If the fediverse can be taken over, then the whole premise was false. And the solution is not to build a wall and keep in only the most ideologically committed people running purity tests.
@aristeon89 Meta is about ten times the size of the Fediverse, which means it can overwhelm by sheer numbers. But the decentralized nature of this place means hand to hand combat for each site "acquired". I would think the Fediverse can dictate terms to Mark Zuckerberg rather than the other way around. And absorbing the Fediverse into Meta means they would be admitting a number of accounts Zuckerberg suspended...
@aristeon89 I don’t think you have to worry about that. People who want to wall-off will wall-off, people who want to connect will connect.
There is going to be some confusion for a few weeks/months, but we’ll soon see where everyone is standing and users will migrate toward stricter servers or more connected servers.
The people asking to "defederate the severs who federate" or two-layers of defederation are either empty threats or will just cut themselves entirely from the network. It’s not worth worrying about them.
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