The fediverse is discussing if we should defederate from Meta’s new Threads app. Here’s why I probably won’t (for now).
(Federation between plume and my lemmy instance doesn’t work correctly at the moment, otherwise I would have made this a proper crosspost)
That happens whether they are defederated or not. They have 1.6bn users, the rest of the fediverse is a rounding error.
This is what happened with XMPP:
Even if the entire fediverse defederates from the Meta instance, they have a huge network which already exists. And people who want the things that a huge network brings will want to be part of it. Mass defederation will just push some people onto the Meta instance because it’s the only place a huge network is operating (and many already have an Insta account so they’re already on it anyway).
That’s not to say that federating with them is necessarily better. Some users will prefer a smaller network. Some instances will want better moderation than Meta are likely to provide. Moderation issues might make it nigh on impossible for most instances to federate anyway.
But you can’t stop them dominating the fediverse by universally defederating. That is not an option. Gmail got big enough to not need XMPP federation; Meta and other potential mega-corp instances are already huge, they don’t need us at all.
The best hope might be for several mega-corp instances to hold each other hostage. Google could kill XMPP because none of its users understood that they were part of a federation and barely noticed when the tiny proportion of non-google users disappeared. But if there’s a Meta instance and a Google instance and a Mozilla instance … it’s hard for one of them to unilaterally withdraw without handing their users over to a competitor.
Removed by mod
I addressed the point about Facebook dominating the fediverse in another comment in this thread. To keep it short, it’d be like they just popped up another platform like Reddit, Twitter, etc, and it wouldn’t really change the trajectory of the fediverse that much, since it’d be no different to another monolithic social media platform.
And for people that want the fediverse to stay small, that would be fine. For those coming from very large sites like Twitter or Reddit, it often will not be because the value of those sites comes from the size of their networks.
It won’t kill the fediverse but it might kill the various dying-mega-site migrations. For some that will be welcome. For others, not so much.
There isn’t a one-size fits all here. The biggest danger is the fediverse devolving into a paranoid war of words solely because some people think there should be.
I came from Reddit, and personally I would rather see slow growth rather than having the fediverse dominated by Facebook.
I am an associate member of the FSF though so there’s a sort of purist bias that isn’t there with most Redditors 🙃
I understand where you’re coming from, though. People resist change, and so people coming from monolithic platforms are more likely to want another monolithic platform.