I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:
- Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won’t care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
- When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won’t care. They will use Threads because its faster.
This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.
Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.
My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.
I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.
We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
Honestly, I don’t see how this is a threat to “small” instances. Why would Meta target defederation with some dude’s 5 user instance that barely registers on anyone’s radar?
The moment that you/a person on your instance engage with threads, it’ll likely use up your storage quota at an unprecedented rate.
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When smaller instances thrive and attract a dedicated user base, they can challenge the dominance of larger platforms like Meta. This poses a threat to Meta’s business model, which relies on maintaining a large user base and monetizing user data and engagement.
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Elon suspended accounts of Journalists. Do you not see that the lizard king can do the same with small instances. And this will happen silently and the users on Threads will be unaware.
If we were to take parallel with how big email providers handle federation, there is a good chance that meta will make it a lot harder for smaller instances to federate in the name of combating spam later down the line (throttling activitypub traffics, requiring certain nonstandard antispam technological measures to be added in their instance, etc).
Whether or not the intention is malicious, it’ll effectively discourage people to “spread out” and run their own instances for their community, and fediverse citizens will slowly but surely migrate to the big operators because of less hassle and that’s where everyone hang out.
