I saw a while back that facebook is opening a twitter competitor which will use the ActivityPub protocol, and thus will be able to federate with other fediverse instances, I also saw they invited some fediverse instance admins for an “off the records” meeting in their HQ.

Question is, what is the general stance on this? Because I despise facebook with every fiber of my being, and would very much like to NOT have facebook lurk around these parts, as I understand there is an option to de-federate them like what happened with the exploading heads instance.

  • TrippyTortugaEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Why sign up to some random instance when you can just join a Meta instance?

    For the same reasons that smaller instances would defederate from Meta. And the same reasons people don’t use FB or Meta now. They suck and they’re not really community-driven. Having the most content isn’t the be-all and end-all. Beyond a certain critical mass, things get too noisy and quality drops.

    But what are they gonna do? Write a letter to Meta? Or give up and join a Meta instance to get their content back?

    The migration from Reddit to Lemmy is essentially the same scenario. Lemmy at least makes it possible for splintering to happen without losing your home instance.

    The way you described it, it’s not like the non-FB fediverse was great and then died. It’s more like the non-FB fediverse was small (compared to FB) and stayed small as FB converted it’s already-large userbase.

    But I agree that any “too big to fail” fediverse instance is a bad thing, because you can lose massive communities this way. I think there should probably be some rules within particular federations that limit the size of instances.

    As far as losing content, I am less concerned because there ought to be a way to clone content from a defederated instance as a sort of “restore from backup”. It’s probably not an existing feature but it sounds possible.