I just read this point in a comment and wanted to bring it to the spotlight.
Meta has practically unlimited resources. They will make access to the fediverse fast with their top tier servers.
As per my understanding this will make small instances less desirable to the common user. And the effects will be:
This is just what i could think of, there are many more ways to be evil. Meta has the best engineers in the world who will figure out more discrete and impactful ways to harm the small instances.
Privacy: I know they can scrape data from the fediverse right now. That’s not a problem. The problem comes when they launch their own Android / iOS app and collect data about my search and what kind of Camel milk I like.
My thoughts: I think building our own userbase is better than federating with an evil corp. with unlimited resources and talent which they will use to destroy the federation just to get a few users.
I hope this post reaches the instance admins. The Cons outweigh the Pros in this case.
We couldn’t get the people to use Signal. This is our chance to make a change.
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The problem is that this doesn’t change the outcome.
To use your example, if we federate people will join the meta instance, if we don’t federate people won’t even know the lemmy.world instance exists, and even if they do they would still join the meta one if it’s bigger.
I totally agree with the sentiment, but I yet have to understand how not federating can change the outcome
The only way smaller instances can thrive and make a strong federation is by making the average person start to care more about privacy.
But you can’t do that if you can’t reach them in the first place
Sorta seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t type of situation.