[…] but the gist was that Instagram had reached out to one of the larger Fediverse servers and asked the person who runs to have a meeting 'off the record'. That person turned them down and told other members of the Fediverse what happened. The general consensus is that this was going to be a monetary offer to allow Instagram to further colonize the Fediverse by purchasing one of the larger servers.
And therein lies the problem: if the majority of users gravitate to a few large servers, then that leaves those larger servers vulnerable to exploitation.
A hard link to an instance is an issue. Instead of depending of a "centralized power", you depend on a "local power". This is, probably, irrelevant in the begging, but later it could cause a drama similar to reddit - like you build a community with 100K people and then instance owner comes to you and say that you must do "X" or leave.
The ideal way to address this would be a possibility to move an account AND a community from one instance to another.
Why should Instagram buy some instance? The software is FOSS, they have a shitton of servers, they can host an instance that is a thousand times more powerful than all of the Feddiverse combined just with their idle stuff. Defederate it if it sucks, but the goal should not be a bunch of ivory tower hermit fortresses with the bridges drawn up.
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