My instance is currently at 19GB after running for about 3 months.

I have -1 communities in my instance because I made a test one and deleted it early on.

I do try to be

I already owned the domain and have access to a server with more than enough resources, so it didn’t have a downside to me.

Upside, I don’t really have to worry about anyone else’s federation choices. Undesirable content like loli/shouta stuff doesn’t appear at all, because I’m basically the only user and don’t subscribe to anywhere that exists so it doesn’t federate to me anyway. My instance never lags because nobody but me uses it. Sometimes it misses comments through federation from overloaded instances, but it seems like the newer version of Lemmy has helped that greatly.

They’ll be devastated when they find out my closed instance with 2 users, 1 of which is inactive, also pre-emptively de-federated them. I shudder to think they’ll ever recover.

If they didn’t care about the population on the Fediverse, they wouldn’t implement it. They might be concerned about what it could be in the future, rather than what it is now.

By invading the space and outdoing the competition, they gobble up the growth our space could have had more effectively.

It’s not just about personal data. But what will definitely happen is they’re going to attempt an Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They’ll embrace the fediverse, then they’ll add their own features on top on their platform without giving back to the wider community. Then, when they leech as many people to their platform as they can from the rest of the Fediverse after making open projects struggle to keep up, they’ll drop it and kill the rest of the network in the process.

I would say it’s better this way for society as a whole. A splintered populace is harder to control. And I’m not just talking about some “guv’ment out to get us” thing, because they’re trying to kill encryption and other dumb stuff like that already. But it’s a lot harder for other people to spread misinformation if the majority of the population isn’t centered around 3 websites.

Of course, there are negatives to this whole thing, too. But I think the net positive will be greater.

The difficult part about that is, the way Lemmy is designed to easily integrate any custom client also allows bots to be made even easier. Only way to really do it would be by restricting the API, and with it, a lot of the freedoms of Lemmy.

Admins who do play ball with Facebook could get pressured by other admins out of doing so. Great, you’ve taken Facebook’s money, but now half the fediverse just shuttered themselves off from you.