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:
- Meta can and will unethically defedrate from instances which are a theat to them. Which the majority of the population won’t care about, again making the small instances obsolete.
- When majority of the content is on the Meta servers they can and will provide fast access to it and unethically slow down access to the content from outside instances. This will be noticeable but cannot be proved, and in the end the common users just won’t care. They will use Threads because its faster.
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.
Love the dialogue here but you always have to follow the money trail. The best way to keep what we love is to bankroll our instances to keep them running and scalable to additional users without ads. Remember, if you aren’t paying for the product then you become the product. Meta has nothing without selling ads or monetizing user data. That’s their business model. As long as we chip in we can always maintain our independence. I’m fine with never seeing or interacting with content from Threads.
Meta is already a multi-billion dollar company that is built like an unstoppable content monetization and tax avoidance machine. If they wanted to, they could probably float an unprofitable Threads dot net until the heat death of the universe. Threads doesn’t need to be profitable for it to succeed, it just needs to crush Twitter, BlueSky, TikTok, Reddit, Tumblr, and the Fediverse under foot. That’s it… that’s the win condition they’re going for, not profitability. This is David verses Goliath moment and, in the real world of monopolistic capitalism, Goliath usually wins.