this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Its not about when people don’t want to federate with meta, its when meta no longer wants to federate with you.
Let me put it this way. If I surveyed every person in my social circles right now, the only person who is using the “Fediverse” as we call it is myself. The others who know about it only know of it because I won’t shut up about it.
But lets say Threads.net takes off, and becomes a new mainstream social media. Maybe its easier to sign up and start using, maybe the UI is a little better, or maybe its just advertised well to current Instagram and Facebook users. Suddenly, 20-30% of the people in my circles might be using the “Fediverse” through Threads.
“This sounds awesome!” I hear you saying. Well there’s a catch. New users to the fediverse tend to just join the biggest instance. We’ve seen this already with Lemmy.world, I personally chose it because it was a lesser populated instance, but it quickly became #1 and is now the fastest growing. Well this means new users would all sign up on Threads, right? Suddenly, the fediverse is 100x larger than it once was, but 80-90% of all the content comes from Threads users.
And then, one day, now with a stranglehold of almost all content coming into the fediverse, Meta is free to defederate from the rest of the platform. Maybe they throw up ads, start selling user data, whatever. Now you and I are left here, with almost all of the traffic gone. Many users switch to threads, because thats where the content is.
Sure, the fediverse is kind of in that final position right now, but the context is much different; everyone here is excited to make this a community. In this scenario, we’d be trying to rebuild the platform. Imagine trying to get everyone to migrate back to MySpace right now, you’d be laughed at whether it was actually a better platform or not.
If it feels like I’m reaching here, look up what happened with XMPP and Google. We have been on this ride before.
I fail to see how that would generally impact people who interact from the fediverse side of it rather than Meta's own instance. Like if Meta decides to no longer federate with the rest of the fediverse, that would be like all the normies signing up for Threads.net and not interacting with Mastodon at all right?
I think you are reaching.
Right, I get what you’re saying and if they aren’t federated to begin with then I don’t think there’s any issue. The issue comes when you federate, get everyone used to being able to interact with that user base and that content, and then defederate. The end result might be the same amount of users on lemmy in either case, but i’d wager the reception at that point is totally different.
In the first scenario, there is only slow and steady growth.
In the second, there is slow and steady growth, followed by huge, rapid growth, followed by a sudden decline that would make user interaction drop off a cliff, while the content and interaction is still available, just on another platform. I’d bet most people won’t be interested in continuing to use a “dead” platform.