Everywhere I look there are people advocating for defederation from this and that! Do you even understand what you’re suggesting? Do you get what’s the point of decentralized social media and activity pub?
This is supposed to be free and accessible for everyone. We all have brains and can decide who to interact with.
If meta or any other company manages to create a better product it’s just natural that people tend to use it. I won’t use it, you may not use it and it’s totally fine! It’s about having options. Also as Mastodon’s CEO pointed out there’s no privacy concern, everything stays on your instance.
Edit: after reading and responding to many comments, I should point out that I’m not against defederation in general. It’s a great feature if used properly. Problem is General Instances with open sign-ups and tens of thousands of users making decisions on par of users and deciding what they can and can not see.
If you have a niche or small community with shared and agreed upon values, defederating can be great. But I believe individual users are intelligent enough to choose.
The argument for defederating is that Meta has an enormous technological and userbase advantage for capturing up all the activity in the fediverse. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the overwhelming majority of future activity on the fediverse happens on Meta controlled instances, if we let them have free reign capturing as much of the fediverse as they can. In that case, with Meta effectively controlling the fediverse, then they don’t really need to play nice anymore. They can introduce a breaking API change and hold all of the non-Meta instances ransom saying to upgrade to their new API, or you won’t be able to participate with their fediverse communities anymore.
So it’s basically a question of do we nip the Meta issue in the bud and preemptively defederate from them, or do we wait until they take over and force us to restart from scratch two years from now.
After 1 day, they already have more users, so I don’t understand how defederating can help us grow?! It will just make more sense for more people to use threads instead, since much more users are there.
You’re not understanding that growth on fediverse instances run by Meta is ultimately bad for the fediverse in the long run.
Let me try explaining like this: Imagine there’s an instance called meta.world and it gets hugely popular. Whenever you browse the all feed, it seems like 95% of the posts are from meta.world. Everybody hates that it ended up this way, and everybody tried to fight it, but it just inevitably happened because Meta has the fastest and most stable servers, and because there are a ton of funny users on Threads who only post to meta.world because Threads heavily favors those communities in their app. Then one day Meta decides that they don’t want to support the fediverse anymore, so they close off access to meta.world. So effectively 95% of the “fediverse” as we knew it vanishes, and you have to join Threads if you want access to those communities again.
It’s the threat of that scenario that has a lot of people wanting to block Meta from the start.
Great point. I get this threat, but do you think closing off would help this? I don’t believe anyone that respects privacy (the type of user that currently uses federated social media) would join meta’s instance. But by defederating, you’re forcing everyone with friends outside this privacy-conscious circle to join meta, and overtime find themselves using it more and more, since it’s more convenient and frankly way more users are there!
By not defederating, you’re giving everyone the option to stay here and have privacy while being able to interact with all their friends, and maybe even convince some of their friends to join! (you would be able to convince them since the underlying protocol is literally the same, but they will gain privacy and won’t see ads, I’d say that’s compelling!)
You say you understand my point about the threat of Meta consuming the entirety of the fediverse, but then you talk about privacy, which is completely irrelevant to my point. What does privacy matter when Meta gains 95% share of the fediverse communities and then closes them off to only Threads users? In that situation, your privacy is completely gone. You have to join Threads to get back in to the old fediverse that Meta took away.
If you pay attention to my response, I’ve said that if you close them now, considering how many users they’ve amassed in like 1 day you would have to join threads (at least the average user will). And when you see the convenience there, you will use Fediverse less and less, so what’s the point?
What I mean by understanding your point is that you’re right, that’s a threat, but I believe what I’ve just said is also a scenario. This is a dilemma.
Yeah, that’s what the defederaters are advocating. You can’t mix Meta with the fediverse, because Meta will consume it. So if you want to participate in Threads, then you have to join Threads.
Assuming the collective fediverse goes through with defederating from Meta, then there’s nothing stopping anybody from creating their own little niche in the fediverse that remains federated with Meta. I wouldn’t argue against that.