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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Technology
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A good response. Civlised and to-the-point.
I disagree.
I hope there'll be people discussing sensibly.
For example the question how the rest of the fediverse would like Meta to act, when / if they have the by far largest instance on Fediverse with Threads.
Should they Rate-Limit queries from their users to other Instances, as to not overload them? This would protect other instances, but make the federated experience worse, driving more people to threads.
Would the Fediverse rather that Meta mirrors images etc on their servers too, or pull those from the original server?
Maybe they have UX ideas that would be useful to have somewhat uniform (like the subreddit/community/magazine stuff here), and would like input on them.
Of course just blocking them is an option for the fediverse, but doing that blindly seems like a missed opportunity for both sides.
More freely available content would be great, wouldn't it?
Maybe they have Ideas on the protocol, that they want to talk with admins about as a first step to gain more perspective. And certainly they are likely to be data-hungry greedy shit, but there is a chance that they are actually good ideas - there are actual people working at meta after all.
There's tons of ways in which this could be useful, and I don't really understand the completely blocking approach I see a lot of.
They want to use ActivityPub, that's awesome, finally something new and big that uses an open freaking standard on the web. What are the downsides? If it sucks for communities they can easily block Meta.
Yes, Meta is not a Company working for the betterment of the world, certainly.
But maybe, just maybe, goals align here, and Meta can make money and improve the Fediverse and the Internet with it. And certainly, maybe they want to "take over" ActivityPub, and that would indeed be bad. And even then, wouldn't knowing because they told you be much better than knowing because they're meta?
So, if they want to change the Protocol, be very, very wary of their proposals. But even there there they could just want reasonable improvements because they suddenly deal with 100x of the next biggest instances.
tl;dr: when you tell people what you'd like them to do, it increases the chances of them doing that.
The issue is once you open these floodgates you're not going to be able to close them, at least not without alienating a vast majority of users on both sides. Furthermore, once meta gains the majority of users and content on its instances (and this is really more of a "when", not "if" situation), they can start making changes to AP and overall infrastructure and forcing other instances to either adapt to that, or get left behind one by one, similar to what google does regardless of W3C and other browsers have to adapt even though it goes against the agreed standard.
If meta gains a foothold in the fediverse and eventually start isolating the smaller instances, it's going to be the email situation all over again, we'll have just a few large trusted providers and the rest will be a seemingly unsafe niche that most people avoid. Giving them the benefit of the doubt is just foolish, meta will not let a few fediverse admins dictate their policy (even assuming they have the backbone to stand up to them, and considering the recent meeting/NDA/"shareholder" drama most of them definitely don't).
Better to nip it in the bud than let it fester like a wound. Give companies as evil as meta an inch and they'll take a mile.