I’ve been hearing that Meta (Facebook) intends to join the fediverse. I have some very big concerns about that, as do apparently many others. There exists a group of instances called the fedipact which will not be federating with Meta, and I was wondering if this instance would be joining. So there is no ambiguity with this post: I have no desire to participate in any instance that is federated with Facebook, and will kindly pass on another Eternal September. Hope that doesn’t come off as aggressive, that’s just where I’m at.
I’m curious what the downside of being federated with an Instance run by Meta is? By federating with the network, Meta won’t miraculously gain some authoritarian control over the entire thing. In fact federating with Meta may well provide the largest opportunity ever to bring new users over to sites like Lemmy and Mastodon by way of exposing them to the potential perks of those sites over Thread.
Not to sound elitist but one of the main reasons I want nothing to do with it is the almost guaranteed influx of normies and casuals. Additionally, Meta does not want to see the fediverse or any other social network grow, they want everyone to use their network and pay them.
I must say, your first reason is kind of asshole, I can understand wanting some communities to remain niche to an extent, but for the whole service just because casuals would join… I don’t know, it feels like useless gatekeeping, especially if those people were still bringing content.
They will have the money to run more bigger faster severs. The risk is the majority start to use those severs as home, then communities end up there, then Facebook end up controlling the communities.
So the threat is Meta offering a better service that draws a user base? Is that flexibility not the entire thesis of fediverse platforms?
Further, if Meta is able to provide a service that users see as so fundamentally better, then they should get a large portion of the population. That’s the nature of a competitive market.
That is the “embrace” part of embrace, extend, extinguish. It is great at first, but once they have that base all in one place it will be monetized and there will be none of the smaller sites left.
But the nature of the federated platforms is that they will always be able to have new instance created that can still access the content of the largest, without explicitly needing that community to move over.