There's been a lot of talk recently about a supposed entry from Facebook to the fediverse, so much so, that we at Musicians Today are inaugurating our blog with this subject.
@vantablack@beach.city created the Anti-Meta Fedi Pact so that folks commit to blocking any fedi instance that might pop up, owned by the corporation. We, along with a lot of folks, have signed it, and we would like to present our reasons why:
First of all, the obvious. It has been documented how Facebook[1] has been a force of evil in the world when it comes to prioritizing ad revenue over social well-being. We won't repeat the individual cases here, but just say we believe there is no discussion on this point.
Related to the above, moderation is a big concern in the fediverse, not so much for huge tech companies. In fairness, moderation is hard and becomes increasingly harder as massive growth occurs. Massive growth being one of the key goals for these companies. On our little corner of the web, growth is not prioritized. Our intention is to be a small and thriving community.
Exploring Facebook even further, their track record of turning users' input into their "product" by manipulating them via black box algorithms and lobbying and such tactics, is a big reason why some of us left big tech social media in the first place. It would be a mistake to ignore the history of the fediverse in this respect.
It is actually OK for the fediverse to not be completely interconnected. Some parts of it are just not going to vibe well with us, and that's fine. We don't (and shouldn't) expect everyone to share our values. An exact match would be, at the very least, boring.
A technical reason: our Little Instance That Could is tiny. We count our active users in the hundreds, not thousands or, well, billions. Suddenly federating with massive new instances would put us under too much pressure, which would almost certainly destroy the experience for our people. Again, we don't need or intend to grow like that.
But, say the previous problem is somehow handled, and we do start federating with Facebook-owned instances, and our people start making connections with people on that side. And then, one day, for any reason, we start seeing awful stuff coming from them, and we decide to defederate. This means that all those connections are suddenly (and irreversibly) severed, and we see this as a tragic event —one some of us got first row seats to, just this week— and one we would very much like to avoid.
We do believe that there is a way forward with the whole situation. Some people have mentioned the idea of having instances that do federate with them, to act as "bridges" so that people have a way of moving back and forth if they choose to. We like this idea and hope something like this can give us peace, we just can't offer to be the bridge.
I'm sure we will hear a lot more about this in the coming months. Stay tuned.
[1] We are aware that Facebook changed their name to Meta. We refuse to call them that in this post because we feel that it obscures their terrible history, which is relevant here.
Except for the cover image, the contents of this site are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
The Musicians.Today cover image was created by
Averil.
© 2023 DoomBloomArt
Theme Klb4 v1.2.2 was with by Lauro W. Guedes
Building with Grav flat-file CMS and based on Quark Theme