The arguments I’ve heard about tracking etc are misguided and don’t understand the actual risks.
Firstly, posts on the fediverse are already likely being consumed by advertising platforms like Facebook & Google. It would be trivial for big tech companies to setup relays that act as scrapers.
Secondly, the value in platform’s tracking individuals is for advertising. There is no mechanism for these platforms to identify you browsing the we if your instance federated with threads. Your instance won’t share cookie sessions etc with threads. It doesn’t increase your exposure.
Thirdly, these platforms have the know how to deal with spam and they will be incentivised to share that tech with other federated instances.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is an evil company. But I haven’t heard a decent argument as to why them joining the fediverse is a bad thing. We always have the option to defederate in the future.
Change my mind.
Remember how Facebook bought Oculus and people thought it was gunna be great because VR was finally getting really strong financial backing but they ended up just making their own VR walled garden that requires you to sign in with a facebook account and you are only able to selectively play with PCVR players if they allow it on their app store?
How is this relevant? Meta isn’t buying the fediverse
Facebook didnt buy the entirety of VR either. But they did fracture the userbase and if you cant spend so much on VR you’re stuck buying into metas walled garden now (Reverb lacks fundamental features) This sorta ground is what Meta is going to go for. They are going to target the largest, most manipulatable audience (which is a lot on here) and swallow them
But they obviously don’t have consumers’ best interests and rights at heart or even care about them for that matter, which they’ve demonstrated time and time again
They are anything but benign and I don’t think anything good can come from their involvement
Just the fact that they will bring so many users to the fediverse through their own locked down platform is a problem in itsself, bad intent or not because it destroys the decentralisation if there are millions of users all on one instance belonging to one company
Facebook is evil. But the fediverse should be resilient to evil bad actors, no matter who they are.
But if they see potential profit in harming, whether directly or indirectly, it they will likely take that opportunity
Yes but the fediverse needs to be resilient enough to deal with bad actors. It’s a probably that needs to be solved for the fediverse to grow, we should run towards the challenges instead of from them.