My stance towards Meta is that the Fediverse needs two types of servers:
Lobby servers that explicitly federate with Meta for the purposes of moving people from Meta to the rest of the Fediverse
Exit servers that explicitly defederate with Meta for the purposes of keeping portions of the Fediverse out of reach from Meta
Both approaches not only can co-exist with each other, they might just be complementary.
People who use Meta need a way to migrate towards a space that is friendly, easy-to-use, and allows them to port their social graph.
But People also need a space that’s free from Meta, and allows them to exist beyond the eye of Zuckerberg.
Guess what? People who use Meta now might want to be invisible to Meta later. And people who dislike Meta might need a bridge to contact friends and family through some mechanism that still allows them to communicate beyond Meta’s control.
@atomicpoet seriously: what makes you think that federating will bring people over? People who stick to FB and IG because of their network the won't move even if they know they can reach across the fence from Threads because FB and IG will not be federated. Whatever is keeping them there now will still be keeping them there.
@atomicpoet I agree,I absolutly hate that I have a FB account ,but for variouse very good reasons I need a space for friends and family to contact me in emergencys etc that doesnt involve giving out my address ,phone or email and at the moment theres only FB for that as almost all my friends and family arent heavy internet users, Netflix ,online shopping and FB is about their limit ,they def wouldnt use Mastodon ,I tried .On the other hand I dont want Meta in my safe space here
@atomicpoet I like the idea here but what would stop Meta from running a custom version of Mastodon - either at start or sometime after - that just disables the ability to export your data/move to a new instance? That would defeat the purpose of the lobby servers.
@atomicpoet "... people who dislike Meta might need a bridge to contact friends and family through some mechanism that still allows them to communicate ..."
Thank you for this. Not being able to contact a user just because they're on a server that happens to federate with Meta is a great concern to me. This is not how things should be. I'm feeling more and more like users are getting caught in the middle of all of this.
@arth That kind of Puritanism isn’t ultimately feasible. Once you federate with a certain number of servers, how do you keep them all in line? And how do you fight the network effect?
Add comment