TLDR; it’s not all about growing as massive as possible and letting everyone talk to everyone. It’s about communities being able to make choices for their user base and the freedom to choose who to federate with. It’s also about users having a choice of which instance they use to interact with the fediverse, and with whom. Having Meta involved limits these choices in not so obvious ways.
Doesn’t the fediverse have an inherent protection and/or immunity from corporate take-over?
Yes, but that does not mean it is invulnerable. Take the World Wide Web as an example, over the past couple of decades the decentralized web has become increasingly centralized. Projects such as Lemmy and Mastodon are a shot back at this trend, to try and break the web up as it was. Each instance gets to decide if letting large corporations federate with them is the best choice or not. It seems that a lot do not want this, and this is exactly the kind of protection from corporate take over that is inherent. The more large central servers are allowed to take a central role, the more power they will gain to snuff small communities and instances. They will do this by fragmenting users bases and communities over time, or any other dirty tricks they can come up with.
Also, having billions of dollars at your disposal is known to increase your influence overall. They can outspend anyone to sell most people on how Threads is interconnected and fediverse friendly, if you let them sell that lie they will win in time. They’ll do this, pull the rug and say how other independent instances aren’t corporating. They will shut off access to these communities in one way or another and begin the process of centralization. It has happened before, and will happen again.
Aren’t we protected?
If you choose to not use Threads, you are not giving your information directly to Meta. But, that does not mean you are safe. Meta is a corporation, and will try to pull whatever tricks they can to take over as the dominate player. They are going head to head with Twitter, what makes you think instances a fraction of Twitters size are safe?
Also, saying we are isolated by our individual instances is a bit humorous as they are federated. If one instance pushes most of the content is that really isolated? What about upvotes, engagement and any other activity that is pushed to other servers via the ActivityPub protocol? These will all be taken in by Meta, which means you are feeding them activity. Sure it’s safer, but they are still getting more data by engaging in the ActivityPub protocol than they get via scrapping pages. Also, they don’t have to play fair with the ActivityPub protocol, there are a lot of dirty tricks that could be used to hamper content on other instances than their own.
Is there anything currently stopping Meta from scraping the Fediverse for our content?
No, and the fediverse should not care. The goal of the fediverse at the moment is to stay independent and have a user base that is not reliant on a single entity and to stay away from the influence of corporate interests. If you operate in a public space, someones always going to be able to see it. It’s all about who owns that public space.
Won’t we grow & educate?
Who is we? Users that value their freedom will stay in the independent fediverse instances. Those who are looking for a twitter alternative will probably go to Threads. Those who don’t care will probably stay on Twitter. Any of these users might have multiple accounts on some or all of these services. Trying to group this together as “we” is a bit disingenuous.
As for growth, it’s not safe to assume that independent instances will grow because of the federation of users from Threads. Users that are on Threads are likely to stay on Threads, users that join instances are likely to stay there. Look to linux users to see why you aren’t going to convert many over the virtues of freedom and decentralization, you’ll just become another “fanboy”.
Aren’t we worried we’re forcing an ultimatum while the Fediverse is still in its infancy?
What is the ultimatum? This is a pretty loaded question, since some of the fediverse is already fractured. The fact you can spin up your own instance, invite whoever you want and keep the interests of your community out of the hands of corporations is the goal. Freedom to host your own community. Anything else is just having a capitalist mindset on growth, the line doesn’t always have to go up. Getting the most users isn’t the end game, it’s having a community that you belong to and feel a part of.
What’s the harm in pulling the ripcord if we try it, and it’s truly not a good fit?
Each instance chooses what is best for their community. Being a part of the mainstream content feed isn’t the goal of most of these decentralized communities.
“What about an influx of low-quality content?”
Why do instances need to let users block Meta when they know their users want Meta blocked? What’s stopping users from going to an instance that doesn’t block Meta if their instance disagrees with their opinion? It’s all about doing what instances communities want, or users can migrate if they feel their needs aren’t being met.
“What if Meta doesn’t moderate well?”
Meta will probably be able to moderate for their advertisers better than most instance operators will be able to. But again, it’s not about moderation and sanitizing content for advertiser revenue, it’s about having a space that is for the community by the community. It doesn’t need to be a single homogeneous community so ads can sell. Some of us want that outside of a corporations control, others don’t or don’t care, all are valid. Thankfully, everyone has a choice instead of being forced to do one or the other.