Sorry. I know it’s getting a bit annoying with all these posts obsessing over this subject but still…
Just to make my position absolutely clear from the start of this - I think the entire fediverse should defed from anything under any form of commercial control, which clearly includes Threads (when/if it enables ActivityPub).
I see a lot of instance admins are adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach to defederating from Threads. With respect, I’d like to ask them - what are you waiting to see? Evidence that Meta is an immoral organisation? Surely you can’t be that naive?
Or is it evidence that Threads will attempt dodgy things with the ActivityPub codebase? That they will attempt Embrace-Extend-Extinguish? If that’s so, I again ask you with respect, surely you can’t be that naive? When Meta start introducing little, disarmingly helpful, tweaks to ActivityPub, will your ‘wait and see’ stance continue? And when Meta role out their own version of the protocol, urging Mastodon, Lemmy etc to adopt it - its free! Its better! - will you still continue to ‘wait and see’?
The privacy thing I don’t feel is (currently) much of an issue. Meta could easily scrape all our data tomorrow if they felt like it. What I fear is privacy after they’ve introduced all their ‘improvements’ to ActivityPub and released their own version. Maybe we’ll end up with a two-state fediverse where one state is happy to federate with Meta and the other is not.
The fediverse was built on the principles of open standards and open source, by people, not commercial orgs. It is slow growing, slow to react and in some areas slow to change. These are, in my opinion, amongst its greatest strengths. There is no endless money pot provided by investors, admins are volunteers running instances on VPS’s, software creators are people doing it as a hobby. This is people power, not money power. There’s no profit motive. The second such a massive profit driven org gets a foothold - and is allowed to - that changes. It’s simply inevitable.
Is the fediverse perfect? Of course not. But I believe the problems it faces can be overcome with patience and persistent forward thinking.
Then there is the fact that some instances (and hopefully increasingly more) are seen as safe areas for gay people, trans people, non-white people, women. Opening the door to Meta means opening the door to a whole shit storm of awful people whom we currently don’t have the tools to protect communities from. Is ‘wait and see’ really a good idea given the fact this almost certainly will happen? I mean ‘wait and see’ what exactly? And yes, I know we have our home-grown awful people here and guess what? We struggle to contain them already! Threads got more signups in the first 12 hours of its existence than the entire current population of the whole fediverse. You want to ‘wait and see’ how many of those people are cunts? Because the answer is ‘a lot’.
The fact is - the fediverse doesn’t need Threads, or any corporate involvement. Yes, its already smaller than Threads, it’s smaller than Twitter, it’s smaller than Reddit. But, at the risk of leaving myself open to obvious jokes, why does size matter? There’s already, in my opinion, enough people throughout the fediverse, esp on Mastodon and Lemmy, to have created places where their is good, lively, vibrant discourse. I’d much rather have quality over quantity. There’s nothing actually wrong with slower, more manageable growth. We’ve all got sucked into believing the bigger something is the better it must be and that unchecked growth is healthy. If we’re growing uh, ‘house plants’ then that might be the case, but we’re not. Because the fediverse is not (currently) motivated by profit, we don’t need unchecked growth. I’ve seen so many reddit refugees recently talking about how much better the ‘feel’ is on Lemmy, how much less pressure and angst and nastiness there is. I can’t think of a single scenario in which instantly adding double the amount of people, some of whom are pretty terrible, without decent tools to manage them, all operating under the control of a company known to embrace/extend/extinguish and who’s sole motivation is profit at all costs can be beneficial to the fediverse.
This is not true. This is why charities and not-for-profit companies and cooperatives exist. Even private companies can do things that are the betterment of their customers rather than only for pure profit. Not every company is as bad as facebook/meta and each one draws the line between making profit and exploiting their customers.
Yeah. But what has GitHub done - or even Microsoft done to GitHub that have caused a big issue for their customers - including the vast amount of opensource developers that rely on them? And what about GitLab which are also a corporation? Would you say we are better off without any of these companies providing their services for free?
What about IFixIt? Or Framework Computer Inc or System76 or the Rossmann repair group? Do these companies only exist to produce profit? No, profit is part of what they work for, but they do large service to the community while making profit rather than trying to squeeze every penny from everyone they can. If any of these wanted to create a server should we imminently defed from them because they are own by a corporation? What about the right to repair movement? Should that be banned if it is funded by say ifixit or Louis Rossmann? Is anything these types of companies do an unhealthy thing for the fediverse?
Yes there are a lot of shitty companies out there, and the incentive models of our current systems favours those that try to take advantage of as many people as they can. But companies are still run by people, and there are still a lot of people running companies that don’t want to make every penny they can out of everyone they possibly can by doing every despicable thing they can. Despite the system pushing them away from that and towards just making profit. Yes they want to make a profit, but the cost of doing so is far more important to some companies than it is to others.
IMO the indent behind those in control of a community is far more important than if the servers are run by a commercial entity or not.