The arguments I’ve heard about tracking etc are misguided and don’t understand the actual risks.
Firstly, posts on the fediverse are already likely being consumed by advertising platforms like Facebook & Google. It would be trivial for big tech companies to setup relays that act as scrapers.
Secondly, the value in platform’s tracking individuals is for advertising. There is no mechanism for these platforms to identify you browsing the we if your instance federated with threads. Your instance won’t share cookie sessions etc with threads. It doesn’t increase your exposure.
Thirdly, these platforms have the know how to deal with spam and they will be incentivised to share that tech with other federated instances.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is an evil company. But I haven’t heard a decent argument as to why them joining the fediverse is a bad thing. We always have the option to defederate in the future.
Change my mind.
I’m gonna try just a bit more.
Meta can’t buy the fediverse, like Google couldn’t buy XMPP. XMPP userbase was consumed regardless. My main point is that if allowed to grow into the largest or one of the largest instances, Meta has the ability to cause a lot of damage.
What can they do? They might add new features, such as custom reactions, or new types of post embeds, or something. Developers now have to choose between having broken posts, or trying to catch up Zuckerberg’s nonstandards, like if it were the browser wars.
When the average user sees broken posts or can’t follow their favourite people anymore because of defederation, they just have a reason to move to a better instance (Threads or some other instance that hasn’t defederated). Defederation works if done early. If it’s done too late, only the hardcore Meta haters will be left.
That’s the worst case. Given their track record, they will use an opportunity to backstab us. I don’t know what I will say if people just let Meta pull an EEE that everyone saw from a mile away. In any case, I consider Meta a massive risk for not much benefit (do we even want a wave of Meta users?).
This is where I think the EEE argument falls apart. Facebook, Instagram, & Twitter are all currently defederated instances with far better features and more people to follow and interact with. The EEE argument doesn’t affect the existing fediverse users. Maybe if Twitter federated there would be users moving between Facebook Threads and Twitter but not from the existing fediverse.