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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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I'm waiting for the part where you explain the problem.
Just like today the folks who want to interact with the quality of discussion you get on facebook will be able to do so, and those who don't, won't.
I have scrolled this thread quickly so maybe I'm misattributing, but I feel like you've commented on how you and others will go to instances with "more users" more than once - as if this is some universal success metric.
I will go to the side which has quality discussion, and I'm exceptionally doubtful it's going to be the part of the fediverse that federates with meta. More users does not equal better discussion. I would argue that past a certain critical mass it almost guarantees lower quality discussion.
The fact that there CAN BE two fediverses seems to me a feature, not a bug.
If you want "quality discussion", why are you on here and not Tildes? Tildes' whole purpose is quality discussion. Shouldn't you go for the place where that's being optimized for?
Tildes is a great example, actually. They're small and quiet and want to be quiet. They don't want to take off. You can get through Tildes in an hour.
That's why I get bored of Tildes easily. I don't want to just be one-and-done with a site. I want to constantly be discovering new things. I want to see number go up (to an extent). I want to read a bunch of comments, some insightful, some dumb.
If I'm going to post something, I don't want to post it to Tildes. I'll get a slow trickle of comments and replies, people replying to a week-old post with something I've long stopped thinking about.
I worry that if defederation comes and severs the fediverse in two, engagement will go down. Mastodon.social isn't part of the fedipact, and likely won't be. Everywhere that relies on content from Mastodon.social - which is a lot of them, non-techies don't want to find a specific instance - will have a lot less content, very suddenly.
People like me who love refreshing feeds will see the torrent of posts slowly... come... to... a... stop. People like me will get bored - where are all the posts? Why can't I see the creators I really like?
"Well, they're on a server that federates with a server that federates with Meta."
So you'll just be left with those in the fedipact. People who are used to the fast-moving feed (like me) will get frustrated. There's a reason why I left Mastodon in 2019ish and why I left Lemmy in 2020 - they got boring quickly (well, Lemmy was also full of tankies). I left Tildes because it got boring quickly too.
I'm in this sort of industry. I'm not going to reveal much about what I specifically do, but I know that most people want something that is new and exciting and moves fast. It draws them in and causes them to spend most of their time there.
When that feed slows down, they spend less time on that site. When they have enough experiences of "opening the app just to close it again", they'll eventually remove it from their home screen (or bookmarks). Then it gets forgotten about.
When the user forgets about a site, it gets less content. In turn, that makes the content even slower. In turn, that drives more people away, except for the die-hards who love slow discussions (like Tildes or 2019-era Mastodon).
Where are the people who left going to go? Well, they might go to where their creators were - somewhere like Mastodon.social. Or they'll leave entirely, or they'll move to Bluesky or Threads.
A lot of those options aren't healthy for the broader fediverse, so you'll just have this one branch that is dominated by Meta and the other which slowly dies as people leave due to increasingly stale content. If they were united, they might've stood a chance against Meta if/when Meta made an anti-competitive move... but divided they're a lot easier for Meta to scoop up and slowly extinguish, XMPP-style.
Again, the fedipact is doing Meta's dirty work for them.
So now, not only are you upset that folks who want quality discussion don't want meta here, because you really badly want to be able to communicate with meta users from the fediverse while giving nothing up, you are also saying that anyone who wants quality discussion should just go elsewhere.
With no malice intended, we seem to be very thoroughly talking past each other, I'm not going to worry about the rest of your points because I don't think there's going to be much common ground that we discover we have to build on.
That's not what I'm saying. You are putting words in my mouth and then refusing to have a conversation. But I get the same feeling that we're going to keep talking past each other.
It doesn't matter because you likely won't read this. But I'm not saying you should go elsewhere - I am simply asking why you chose here and not a place that focuses on discussion, like Tildes. I am not telling you to "go away"; I'm merely pointing out that there must be more to your decision and it can't all be because you want serious discussions, since this place isn't suited for that as well as others are.