I cam here to get away from all the corporate BS, but suddenly people want to welcome Facebook/Meta to the fediverse? I cannot fathom how people see their intentions as pure or innocent, especially since they aim to profit off of the open source software everyone has worked so hard on.
I just don’t see how the fediverse survives if it decides to let these massive companies make their instances. It feels like it’ll be a repeat of the rise of social media, where all the smaller forms got wiped out by large, consolidated social media platforms.
How would federating with Threads pose any privacy risk to other users in the fediverse? I’m not trying to be snarky just genuinely curious. It would seem on the surface that the only thing we’d be doing is blocking off Threads’ mass of users and content, while they’d still have free access to any other instance.
My understanding was that by not having our accounts hosted on Meta servers or using the Threads app, we’d be able to access their content without agreeing to their horrid privacy policy
The risk is not so much Threads having access to our data, but thst Threads, with millions of users and teams of full time devs, becomes the standard, allowing Meta to control the development of the open source protocol, and browbeating everyone into using their instance/version/servers.
Companies hate competition more than anything. If meta gets its tentacles in the fediverse, it’ll do its best to be the only option available. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
I’m pretty sure that, under the hood, they become evil towards their users and don’t change from that. And will never reconsider rescinding the things we’re grateful to not have in the fediverse: profits fueled by advertising rather than donations, tracking sensitive information (including that one can and will use against you), selling that information, and obscure, closed algorithms.
But what you said may be right. Those goddamn C&D orders backed by powerful lawyers…