The arguments I’ve heard about tracking etc are misguided and don’t understand the actual risks.
Firstly, posts on the fediverse are already likely being consumed by advertising platforms like Facebook & Google. It would be trivial for big tech companies to setup relays that act as scrapers.
Secondly, the value in platform’s tracking individuals is for advertising. There is no mechanism for these platforms to identify you browsing the we if your instance federated with threads. Your instance won’t share cookie sessions etc with threads. It doesn’t increase your exposure.
Thirdly, these platforms have the know how to deal with spam and they will be incentivised to share that tech with other federated instances.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is an evil company. But I haven’t heard a decent argument as to why them joining the fediverse is a bad thing. We always have the option to defederate in the future.
Change my mind.
Becsuse you don’t move to the next phase until you reach a milestone. The embrace is the first step, to convert a small percentage of users of the original platform. Once you have those, you extend your features to have those users recruit more users to that specific instance or implementation, since they are more feature-rich or stable or whatever. Then once you have a critical point of users on your instance, you defederate from all others and develop your walled garden which now has all the users and the content.
I was gonna say that I never expected or wanted lemmy/mastodon to become mainstream anyway, far from it. And like dual-booting linux and windows, there are just some things I won’t abdicate in favour of convenience or having more followers/software or being on a platform with more market power.
But you know what, it’s a spectrum, from the volunteer/libre-heavy to the hideous proprietary tyrannies:
??? > FOSS > wikipedia > reddit > google > microsoft > twitter > facebook > ???
Maybe if we are able to accommodate a large fraction of the mod community of reddit and let the flexibility of federated diversity and “3rd-party apps” flourish against facebook’s top-down approach we might create a wikipedia-like oasis…
But probably not, because there is too much money to make in appmaking rather than written content creation.
