I’m not convinced there’s a winning route once they’re in. But, maybe I’m just the pessimist.

Neither am I. But universal pre-emptive defederation just cuts to the end game without any kind of fight. Meta users won’t even notice if/when they defederate because they never knew about us in the first place. And defederated instances will lose users to Meta because some people use social media in ways that only work well with bigger networks.

I’m all for some instances saying they want their networks to stay small and users who prefer it that way should have somewhere to go. But users who want a bigger network should have better options than signing up with Meta.

EEE is the risk, and surely their intent. But pre-emptive defederation from an instance that already has 1.6bn sign-ons is doing to ourselves exactly what google did to XMPP. If there are no independent instances allowing access to the mega-network, people who want the mega-network have nowhere else to go.

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore…

As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.

Mass defederation is just giving up before the fight starts. The fight may not be winnable, of course. But making the fediverse invisible to Meta users is exactly how google killed XMPP.

The only way they co-opt the existing userbase is if everyone defederates from them and people who need/want a bigger network have no option but to move to Threads. This is what happened to XMPP and we risk doing it to ourselves this time around.

I’m not saying no instance should defederate. There are good reasons to avoid them. But if there are no independent instances federated with them, Meta dominates the space by default and without anywhere else for its users to go (unless they want a smaller network and know about the existence of defederated instances).

I don’t think it’s that people want a monolithic platform? They just want a network that is big enough to provide enough new, high quality content to keep them amused/informed.

Back in the day this was a constant struggle for bulletin boards (the best of which were focused on a particular hobby or area of interest). Too small and the place was dead, often with a lot of poor quality content with no one around to correct it. Too big and it became impossible to moderate, and difficult to keep track of who was reliable and who was full of shit, and difficult to find what you were interested in if a handful of threads took off and pushed everything else out of sight.

After BBs mostly died, I used Twitter and Reddit as newsfeeds with informed commentary attached, plus bonus cute animal content. Mastodon and Lemmy/Kbin aren’t (yet) big enough to fulfill that role. Not enough of the commenters and sites I want to read stuff from are on it, and there are too few users to rely on to fill the gap.

At work, we want to switch. We use Mastodon and Twitter atm. But there are not (yet) enough specialists in our field in the fediverse for it to work. A small fediverse just can’t do the job we need it to do. (FWIW we’re public sector researchers; this is about disseminating research and finding collaborators, not advertising products.)

There is no one size fits all and neither should there be. The danger is that the small-is-good parts of the fediverse disappear because the content devolves to endless bitching about what other instances should have done and why won’t they all agree with us (even though we’re not a monolith, honest).

And for people that want the fediverse to stay small, that would be fine. For those coming from very large sites like Twitter or Reddit, it often will not be because the value of those sites comes from the size of their networks.

It won’t kill the fediverse but it might kill the various dying-mega-site migrations. For some that will be welcome. For others, not so much.

There isn’t a one-size fits all here. The biggest danger is the fediverse devolving into a paranoid war of words solely because some people think there should be.

That happens whether they are defederated or not. They have 1.6bn users, the rest of the fediverse is a rounding error.

This is what happened with XMPP:

In 2013, Google realised that most XMPP interactions were between Google Talk users anyway. They didn’t care about respecting a protocol they were not 100% in control. So they pulled the plug and announced they would not be federated anymore. …

As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.

Even if the entire fediverse defederates from the Meta instance, they have a huge network which already exists. And people who want the things that a huge network brings will want to be part of it. Mass defederation will just push some people onto the Meta instance because it’s the only place a huge network is operating (and many already have an Insta account so they’re already on it anyway).

That’s not to say that federating with them is necessarily better. Some users will prefer a smaller network. Some instances will want better moderation than Meta are likely to provide. Moderation issues might make it nigh on impossible for most instances to federate anyway.

But you can’t stop them dominating the fediverse by universally defederating. That is not an option. Gmail got big enough to not need XMPP federation; Meta and other potential mega-corp instances are already huge, they don’t need us at all.

The best hope might be for several mega-corp instances to hold each other hostage. Google could kill XMPP because none of its users understood that they were part of a federation and barely noticed when the tiny proportion of non-google users disappeared. But if there’s a Meta instance and a Google instance and a Mozilla instance … it’s hard for one of them to unilaterally withdraw without handing their users over to a competitor.

Google killed XMPP by being the vast majority of the network and then defederating from the rest. Most of the gmail users didn’t even notice anything had happened.

I see a couple of differences here. One is that it should be obvious to even the most casual of users that other instances exist. And the second is that other mega-corps have said they’ll build instances too. With multiple very large instances, they may end up holding each other hostage, for fear of losing users to each other when so many people have multiple logins just because they have an account with one of the mega-corps.

One thing is for sure. Insta has 1.6bn users and it doesn’t need to federate with anyone at all; the fediverse is a rounding error to them. Some people will want the massiveness of the network, others will want better moderation than the mega-corps are likely to offer, and some will prefer smaller networks anyway. There will be as many reactions as there are instances to react. And that will have to be fine.

I think they’re going to build it into Instagram? Instant 1.6bn users.