JoJo
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.
This happened to me this morning. And because the link was from a work email but I was logged in on my personal account, Edge wanted me to sign in to view it, requiring time-wasted on a 2FA process for no good reason whatsoever (obv I just closed Edge and copied the link over to Firefox).
The loss of productivity is large regardless of which method you choose to view the link. May this be the beginning of the end for Microsoft. I am fuming.
It’s difficult to get China and India off coal because they’re doing most of the world’s manufacturing and some processes are currently impossible without it. But ‘we’ exported manufacturing to Asia and ‘we’ buy the products the coal is used for. ‘We’ don’t get to wriggle out of responsibility by pretending that a couple of low and middle income countries are somehow responsible for ‘our’ excessive consumption.
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).
