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.

  • Zadkine@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Basically this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

    First they will add loads of new users and become the dominant instances. Then, they will add their own proprietary features that other instances cannot support. Finally, their extensions become the new de-facto standard, marginalizing the original implementations.

    Since Meta has proven itself to be an evil company that does not act in good faith, it is better to not federate with them from the start.

    • g5pw@feddit.itEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Exactly this. In a federated network, the instance with the majority of users could dictate the protocol, forcing the smaller issues to continually adapt or die. See this post for a very real example of this.

      • Gsus4@lemmy.oneEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        But why do the current lemmy instances have to die if facebook decides to make ActivityPub+goldextra? We’ll just stay on our branch, maybe lose a few users who should know better. Facebook isn’t even making use of ActivityPub’s federation anyway, which is why we are here.

        I’m actually afraid that they won’t defederate at some point but find some way to track the activities of the federated servers.

        • Dr Cog@mander.xyzEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Becsuse you don’t move to the next phase until you reach a milestone. The embrace is the first step, to convert a small percentage of users of the original platform. Once you have those, you extend your features to have those users recruit more users to that specific instance or implementation, since they are more feature-rich or stable or whatever. Then once you have a critical point of users on your instance, you defederate from all others and develop your walled garden which now has all the users and the content.