I’m conflicted. I have no sympathy for Meta, but I think it would be a mistake to defed from all corporate-run servers axiomatically. Involvement from deep-pocket industries has its issues, but it also builds legitimacy and awareness.
You wouldn’t want your email provider to block all communication with Gmail, just because it’s Google-hosted, would you?
Ultimately, the strength of the decentralized model is to allow those who don’t want to see normie Meta content to move to a platform like Scicomm. But I worry for the drama and fallout when large instances make decisions that affect a huge number of users.
Google and Microsoft broke email interoperability. I absolutely would have wanted open source hosters walling off from them. Now it’s too late for email. It’s not too late for the Fediverse.
There are for profit instances that have not provoked the same reaction such as the ones run by Flipboard, Vivaldi, Medium, etc. But Meta has such a bad track record that it’s a case where most are deciding to exercise caution
Exactly. The reason to go straight to the nuclear option with Meta is because absolutely nothing else is powerful enough to do them any harm whatsoever.
Smaller companies can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. But when a company can throw enough money around to buy every member of the Fediverse a new Ferrari, we need to form up for battle while we still can. Or we’ll be defeated before we even begin.
The companies you mentioned are also nowhere CLOSE to the size and resources of meta. I’m not sure any of those companies could overrun the fediverse as a whole even if they wanted to, maliciously. But Facebook? I have no doubts.
I’m conflicted. I have no sympathy for Meta, but I think it would be a mistake to defed from all corporate-run servers axiomatically. Involvement from deep-pocket industries has its issues, but it also builds legitimacy and awareness.
You wouldn’t want your email provider to block all communication with Gmail, just because it’s Google-hosted, would you?
Ultimately, the strength of the decentralized model is to allow those who don’t want to see normie Meta content to move to a platform like Scicomm. But I worry for the drama and fallout when large instances make decisions that affect a huge number of users.
Google and Microsoft broke email interoperability. I absolutely would have wanted open source hosters walling off from them. Now it’s too late for email. It’s not too late for the Fediverse.
There are for profit instances that have not provoked the same reaction such as the ones run by Flipboard, Vivaldi, Medium, etc. But Meta has such a bad track record that it’s a case where most are deciding to exercise caution
Exactly. The reason to go straight to the nuclear option with Meta is because absolutely nothing else is powerful enough to do them any harm whatsoever.
Smaller companies can be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. But when a company can throw enough money around to buy every member of the Fediverse a new Ferrari, we need to form up for battle while we still can. Or we’ll be defeated before we even begin.
The companies you mentioned are also nowhere CLOSE to the size and resources of meta. I’m not sure any of those companies could overrun the fediverse as a whole even if they wanted to, maliciously. But Facebook? I have no doubts.
I’m more concerned about them fiddling with open fed standards like Google did with XMPP, resulting in its effective death.
That’s my concern as well. The companies mentioned don’t really have the sway to do that either, but Meta definitely could.
Kinda seems like paradox of tolerance. Meta sure as hell doesn’t have any incentive to help the fediverse.
In retrospect, I wish they would have done so when it was still viable. I wish they all would’ve done so and shown Google the door.
I didn’t know it at the time Gmail was introduced. But I know it now, and this is the similar point in time for the fediverse.