Convince the population at large it doesn’t work, or even that it’s dangerous.
Like community run utilities, universal healthcare, or any number of things that so obviously work better without a profit motive
Make the populace at large see the fediverse as a failed experiment, a hive of criminal activity, or a bunch of tiny toxic echo chambers
Hell, they could even push legislation that makes running social media out in the open impossible for individuals
Frankly, I think this is the only reasonable stance to take with Facebook.
They do a lot of good things. They do a lot of bad things. The entity itself has zero understanding of the difference
Take the good - Facebook has invested in the maturation of a lot of technologies…as the only clear victor in social media, they very literally have more money than they know what to do with, and they threw some of that at FOSS
Leave the bad… Or more accurately, do everything you can - not only to block their data collection and manipulation of you, but also of your friends and family. Ad blockers, local cdn, and Firefox if they’ll go for it
And most importantly, keep them far from the operations of anything you hold dear. The fediverse should make this list - this is something important. It’s social media without an agenda - that’s both rare and pretty damn important for all of us
They can’t stop. There’s a lot of good people at Facebook, but they can’t stop - that’s just what a corporation is. I’ll happily break down why from first principles, but the takeaway is this - every last employee of Facebook could be the most moral, competent group out there and it’d still act like an amoral cancer on society
It’s not a matter of good or evil, they will take every path that promises ROI on a time frame inversely proportional to their size, and they’re freaking huge…
I share your priorities, but I don’t think you understand the depth and breath of how they can ruin this for us… The only guarantee is that, at some point (maybe tomorrow, maybe in 5 years), they’ll ask “how can we extract value from this investment?”. That’s what a corporation is, it can’t help it anymore than fire can choose how hot to burn
But even before then, we have misaligned goals. At best, their priority is to generate an endless stream of advertiser friendly content, extract information about users, and grow endlessly. At worst, they want to use us to help kill Twitter while ensuring federation of individuals does not become a viable model for social media
There’s also a way to add matrix usernames to Lemmy accounts, so it’s possible to make an app that ties the two together. Is that a feature people would care about?
By convincing people at large that social media run by individuals or groups isn’t viable.
Personally, I’d do it by attacking the credibility of the admins. Sow doubt. “they only run servers so they can steal your data”, “look at this guy! He pretends he cares about free speech, but he’s abusing his power to censor and radicalize people!” “The only reason you’d use these private instances is if you have something to hide. That place is for criminals”
They might even be able to get legislation passed to make it legally risky to run the servers in the US if they control the narrative
Only early adopters, technical people, and the privacy minded care about how this actually works, and we’ve been telling our friends and family how bad Facebook is for years (for good reason). At first they didn’t care, but now I get push back
Next, make it unreliable. If it goes down frequently, gets flooded by bots, or just starts to suck in general, most of the people here now will leave, no matter how important federated social networks are. Maybe they’ll go to servers that bend over backwards to become offshoots of threads, maybe they’ll look for Reddit clones elsewhere, personally I’d start up a private federation for friends and family if this goes south
Regardless, this place will become an empty mall - if it’s not a healthy form of social media I’m not going to spend much time here, and I’m extremely passionate about it
And the last option is just ads and incentives. Make it tempting and play to fomo.
They’ll probably do all of this to some degree, especially if we explode in numbers and present actual competition.
We’re ready to handle it, but we also need to make sure the battle lines are as far away as possible