I don’t think I’ve seen Ploum’s essay about this posted in this discussion yet. The history of how Google killed XMPP is relevant here because Meta is very aware of that history. “Competition is for losers”, and the fediverse is the competition.

That said, I suspect the only thing defederating our instance from Meta is going to do is help send a message they’re not welcome here in the fediverse - and I think that has a lot of value, but whichever choice is made I don’t think is going to materially change our experience here on Lemmy. It looks like they’re going after Twitter and Mastodon, not Reddit and Lemmy/Kbin right now. That email that was leaked (and posted elsewhere in this discussion) implies they’re only going to bother federating with larger communities in Mastodon that are willing to work closely with them which makes sense because all of these tech companies want a heavily controlled (by them) walled garden experience. I’m guessing initially that agreement for instance owners is going to mostly be content moderation standards that are going to largely be in line with what’s already being enforced, but that’s not going to be their end goals because everyone not on Threads but is using a compatible platform is someone they might be able to bring to Threads and more effectively mine their data. I’m really curious about that meeting, because if “require email for sign-ups and provide that information to Meta, ‘for moderation purposes’” is one of their requirements off the bat, that’s going to give them the ability to identify quite a few Mastodon users for marketing outside of the platform.

I want the Dude’s thoughts on this, because of the email that was leaked and because he believed in Lemmy enough to make this instance - what does the future of Lemmy and the fediverse look like to him? I want the thoughts of someone who didn’t come from Reddit in the past couple of months because they’ve had a lot longer think about what the fediverse, and the Internet as a whole, could look like, and that vision probably doesn’t line up with anything the big tech companies could ever make. We already know Dessalines’ thoughts on this, and since he’s working from the “capitalism fucks over everything” part of his political views I think his views are going to line up with a lot of other people’s here on the fediverse (a lot of disagreement on the left stems from what happens after we eat the rich, not anything up to that point), but I do want more opinions on this from people who are deeply philosophically invested in the fediverse as an idea.

I don’t think defederaton is going to do anything but help us stand in solidarity with a large chunk of the fediverse in saying “Fuck Meta”. But I like that message. Fuck Meta.