Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I'm not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.

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[–] xNIBx@kbin.social 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The people that would abandon one platform to follow their favorite "high follower" poster are normies that never cared about what service they were using to begin with

Thats now how things work. Let's say that now you are following people from fediverse. Those people are motivated to post things, because someone needs to, because they want to grow the community, etc. Meta joins, then meta people post a trillion things(because they are a trillion people, some of which might even be paid by meta). Those initial fediverse people no longer post things because "they have already been posted".

Then you defederate meta. Congratulations, now you have 0 content and 0 content submitters. You will start to start from the beginning, from an even worse point than we are atm. You are now dead.

Very few people are as ideologically driven as they think they are. Ultimately it is about quality of life. And maybe you can tolerate some junk because of your ideology but everyone has their limit. Content is king, not only for the "normies" but for everyone. What is the point of a fediverse that has nothing to interact with and noone to interact with you?

[–] wagesj45@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Then the fediverse was only a temporary stopgap until Meta (or any other corporation) made a better product than Twitter. It was doomed from the start.

[–] xNIBx@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Big companies can do whatever they want. But we are enabling them to do it easier if we federate with them. When i joined reddit 15? years ago, it wasnt that dissimilar to the fediverse. Of course it is even harder now to replicate the thunder in a bottle that reddit was and to scale but still.

[–] wagesj45@kbin.social 3 points 1 year ago

The culture may have been similar to fediverse culture, but the underlying structure was nowhere near similar. It was just as much a private site run by (benevolent) dictators.