this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Is that necessary though? I feel like we should let them join. If they do something malicious, then we can block them. IMO, it doesn't make sense to just preemptively block them for no real reason.
It is wholly necessary. They will start massive data mining operations if they join, harming users of all instances.
Data mining can happen without any of that, everything you post in the fediverse is literally available for anyone to see. Realistically, the most harm they can do is build controlled communities that grow so huge that they drown out all of the fediverse's open communities.
Your most harm scenario is exactly what they want to do.
Yeah, it is. And I'm not saying that's not a valid reason to resist companies in the fediverse, it totally is. I'm just saying the privacy concerns everyone is mentioning don't really make sense, anything they could get, everyone already has
Yeah I kind of roll my eyes about it too. "Things you delete are there forever" - that's literally how the internet has always worked. It's like when people found out their snap chats and Instagram stories could be seen by anyone who worked at the companies...like fucking obviously, they DEVELOPED the app and host all the content?!
Look at what happened with Google Chrome and browser standards. We don't want a company that dominates the landscape changing the rules in their favour.
They've demontrated their evil nature in the past, promoting divisive and inciteful material and anything to drive engagement for the sake of advertiser dollars. I don't think we need to wait for them to do it again in the Fediverse. Better to head that shit off right up front.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft did it before, we shouldn't let Meta do it now.
They will not do anything overtly malicious. But, in 5-10 years the entire fediverse will be under their control:
First, they will be early adopters, they will provide insane amounts of funds to improve the platform and ecosystem.
As the platform improves and the user base grows, they'll start pushing for additional features to the standard under the guise of improvements. Even if the standard doesn't accept the changes, if the biggest platform does, it becomes the defacto standard.
New features will be introduced faster than anyone else can develop them, essentially shutting competitors down. They will also start offering proprietary services to form an ecosystem under their control.
Once they control the pie, they'll make it increasingly difficult for small instances to operate via things like security updates and increasing the prices of their now essential services. Of course, this won't affect them.
At this point, the decentralized, free, and open fediverse will effectively be fully under the control of Meta.
This is not speculation. This happened with chrome and web browsers. This is happening with GitHub/VSCode and Microsoft. This is how tech giants expand.