Personally, I hope my Instance, lemmy.world, pursues defederation with all large tech company properties. We just don’t have the resources to fight them any other way, and we never will. It’s an arms race they have a 10-20 year head start in.
Corporations are not actually citizens. They deserve no rights within this space.
agreed. if lemmy.world federates w/ meta or any large corporate entity it will be time to move on
I just want to say this. If the fediverse gets in bed with big tech I’m out. I was absolutely tired of the fake ads posted to Reddit by advertisers. Tired of the misinformation, bots, bots posting misinformation, bots arguing with bots. If big tech comes to the fediverse and doesn’t get defederated we will have that shit here too. And I can absolutely live without all that malarkey.
I’m conflicted. I have no sympathy for Meta, but I think it would be a mistake to defed from all corporate-run servers axiomatically. Involvement from deep-pocket industries has its issues, but it also builds legitimacy and awareness.
You wouldn’t want your email provider to block all communication with Gmail, just because it’s Google-hosted, would you?
Ultimately, the strength of the decentralized model is to allow those who don’t want to see normie Meta content to move to a platform like Scicomm. But I worry for the drama and fallout when large instances make decisions that affect a huge number of users.
The only reason to pursue “corporate legitimacy” is for profit, which. I’d say that folks interested in meta content can simply join meta instances.
I’ve seen a lot of comparison to email services, and I think it’s an apples to oranges comparison. Email is meant to be a electronic communication standard to allow you to communicate with anyone. The fediverse is all about individual community control, not global and universal communication.
Indeed. Email is a good analogy to explain the federation principle, not to argue about the finer details. But going along with it, spam email is being blocked. Whole IP ranges are blocked (“defederated”) by spam filters, because otherwise, good grief…
You wouldn’t want your email provider to block all communication with Gmail, just because it’s Google-hosted, would you?
In retrospect, I wish they would have done so when it was still viable. I wish they all would’ve done so and shown Google the door.
I didn’t know it at the time Gmail was introduced. But I know it now, and this is the similar point in time for the fediverse.
There are for profit instances that have not provoked the same reaction such as the ones run by Flipboard, Vivaldi, Medium, etc. But Meta has such a bad track record that it’s a case where most are deciding to exercise caution
The companies you mentioned are also nowhere CLOSE to the size and resources of meta. I’m not sure any of those companies could overrun the fediverse as a whole even if they wanted to, maliciously. But Facebook? I have no doubts.
I’m more concerned about them fiddling with open fed standards like Google did with XMPP, resulting in its effective death.
That’s my concern as well. The companies mentioned don’t really have the sway to do that either, but Meta definitely could.
Exactly. The reason to go straight to the nuclear option with Meta is because absolutely nothing else is powerful enough to do them any harm whatsoever.
Smaller companies can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. But when a company can throw enough money around to buy every member of the Fediverse a new Ferrari, we need to form up for battle while we still can. Or we’ll be defeated before we even begin.
