I can totally see where you’re coming from.
On the one hand, the reason why I have chosen to eshew all social media and run degoogled Android on my phone is because of privacy concerns. So if Meta federates, I can access all that content from an app and network that respects my privacy, so that’s good right?
My problem is not so much privacy, I’m more worried about the dominant position Meta achieves on the fediverse by it’s sheer size. It will absolutely dwarf everything else. We already know this by just looking at the numbers, so if we wish to preserve the culture of the fediverse I see no other choice but to defederate and set up quarantined servers that exclusively federates with Meta and nothing else. Any server that federates will only see posts from Meta.
There might potentially be technical solutions to limit how much you see from one instance, but we don’t have them right now.
For people in the FOSS sphere there is also a sense of “fool me once” when it comes to megacorporations engaging with projects, e.g. Google with XMPP, Microsoft with internet explorer, Google with Chrome and so on. There is simply no trust and we have been burned before in ways that has left lasting impressions that might be hard to understand if you have not experienced it yourself. Maybe it reaches a degree of suspicion that might seem paranoid to others.
I also feel that Lemmy right now gives me back a sense of what the internet used to be, before the walled gardens, and I feel that it is a fragile state of affairs that must be protected at all costs. It feels like I can finally breathe again after a long time with my head beneath the waters, and I don’t want to be plunged under again.
Sorry for the ramble, I just felt like I had to put my feelings in print.
What an amazing piece of history!