It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml admin team took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it’s users will not be allowed to proceed.
We strongly encourage other instance administrators to do the same, given the grave threat they pose to the fediverse.
I’d argue that we need to be blocking them now, and then perhaps consider unblocking if we grow large enough.
Not blocking early is what XMPP did and it was basically destroyed by google’s disproportionate network effect: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I can see something very similar happening to lemmy, where instead of letting communities grow naturally on separate instances into hardened, well moderated, popular communities, facebook’s version of “lemmy communities” will take over the All page for everyone, all the time, with facebook-controlled content, simply because their userbase is so large that no other lemmy community could compete with the upvote counts. That’s just one way network effects could screw us over, who knows how many different ways facebook could extend and extinguish the decentralized nature of lemmy like google did to XMPP…
Guys, I understand why company like Meta would like to federate with us. I know, they might require some kinda paperwork to federate with other instances and call it “anti terrorism, anti racism”, etc. However, currently, we need their userbase to be able to use lemmy. Only in that case, people might consider switching to lemmy or other microblogging platform.
People are just too stubborn to even think about switching services. We need to keep this bar very much low, so it is easier for them.
Did you even read my comment? What do you say about the issue of harmful federation network effects or corporations’ incentives to embrace, extend, and extinguish?
Lemmy is not a corporation, it is an open source decentralized platform. There is no inherent reason for the platform to try and get as many users as quickly as possible. And if we did federate with meta, that would only hurt the prospects of getting new users because users on meta who like the idea of federation wouldn’t feel the need to make a new account because they’d already have access to the fediverse through meta’s servers…