app_priori

Well that's because Mastodon has many shortcomings. Like the search sucks. It's hard to find people to follow without asking people for recommendations. Mastodon is scarcely a Twitter replacement; it feels like it was built to create extremely insular communities. Like Gab and Truth Social run on Mastodon's software.

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.

1. As if Lemmy currently isn't overrun with low effort memes? Have you seen all those cans of beans running amok here?
2. I imagine there are many parties already scraping content from the fediverse as we speak - that's the nature of public web content.

People have a tendency to flock to centralized services. Even on here the majority of activity takes place on Lemmy.world, the fediverse already has a potential centralization problem.

With your point on YouTube, a fediverse version of YouTube that has a similar level and amount of content is impossible due to hosting costs. I have yet to see anyone willing to subsidize a fediverse version of YouTube.

And what's wrong with people making that choice? I know some of the "mainstream" people on Mastodon right now left because of Twitter's craziness but would probably be open to having an account on Threads or Blue Sky. Why the paranoia about people making choices that are best for them? TBH Mastadon search sucks and finding accounts to follow is hard.

Why would their existing communities and friends leave for threads.net if they are on Mastodon to begin with? Most fediverse users I find seem to be pretty passionate about the platform, I doubt they will leave just because their friends are on Threads.

Exactly. Which is why I believe that all this fearmongering is because of Meta's reputation (rightfully so) rather than because Meta actually has a plan to destroy the fediverse. And it's not the like the fediverse can be actually destroyed, people can always start new instances at any time.

I think that article is mostly fearmongering.

Most people using Mastodon right now are not following mainstream people on their feeds - they are mostly following like-minded people who have made the switch from Twitter. If their server decides to federate with Meta, it will actually improve their experience because they can start following mainstream people from the comfort of their Mastodon feed. And if Meta decides to break ActivityPub (which I doubt), it will be back to the original status quo for most users.

And most mainstream people will not be signing up for Mastodon anyways, they will be signing up for Threads/Blue Sky.

I mean wouldn't that be not a bad thing? The people who don't want to federate will be left in their own community with their posts/content intact.

I don't think so. How would they kill the fediverse? Like there will still many communities that will not federate with Meta and still continue to operate as usual.

Ever heard of Mastodon blocklists? I mean defederation has been happening for a while.

But I think that's fine. Instances should have every right to block instances that they disagree with.

And that's within your right too. It goes both ways.