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.
I don't think extreme moderation is necessary, as I believe that most people are good and willing to be nice and helpful and can be reasoned with. However, if it is clear that someone is so consumed by hatred that they can't, then these people needs to be kicked out, otherwise they will just spread their misery to everyone else.
People who seek the same things will naturally group together, the Fediverse really isn't different than the independent forums of the early internet, except that we can use one account to access them all now, so scaling would be more on the addition of more instances. There will be good ones, there will be bad ones, but that's humanity.
Open source is about letting everybody use what you make, even those that you don't like, Facebook has the right to the ActivitHub protocol like everybody else, but so far they are doing a pretty bad job at their first attempt. I think the only way for Facebook et. al to survive is if they fire Zuck and bring in their equivalent of Nadella.