The only person I’m seeing throwing a fit in this thread is you. People aren’t downvoting you because you disagree with them, they’re downvoting you because you are the petulant child.

Those on Meta would then go "Huh, Lemmy?" and look into it. It's essentially free passive advertising by any Lemmy user.

Lemmy is growing to the point where, for more than a week, a lot of adjustments had to be made to various instances to handle the scale.

I'm not against it growing more by any means, but I think it's worth recognizing that, as Meta enters the Fediverse, it's not going to stop with Threads. Eventually it will likely find better ways to interact with Lemmy, Matrix, etc.

A common theme at the moment is that we have communities sharing a same content category, but each community is spread throughout different instances. An example is the different general programming communities.

It's possible - perhaps even likely - that, eventually, most of the communities for a given category will fade out, and people will naturally converge toward one instance for a given category.

There is the chance that Meta becomes an instance for many of these. What happens from there is that Meta has ownership over these communities.

Yall seem to be purposefully ignoring reality to throw a tantrum over something that hasn't even happened yet. The fact you're all immediately screaming to block them before anything has happened is pathetically isolationist. That behavior will eventually carry over to how new users are treated and Lemmy will rot like Voat did.

Your mention of Voat is the first I've ever heard of it.

Anyway, not all of us are "screaming". Personally, I'm bordering on indifference - I don't have much control over it.

That said, assuming people actually want freedom from corporate ownership, I haven't seen an argument that makes a valid case for federating with Meta.

Federation with Meta is not necessarily mutually exclusive with this, but it's thin ice. And history has shown time and time again with the Internet that this is the case.

Of course, there are some good things that come from that kind of integration - irrespective of user adoption; it's not all bad.

Edit: Too many of you are taking your reddit garbage over here. This isn't the same site. But nah, you're just gonna instantly downvote anything you disagree with while not engaging remotely because you can't offer up a convincing argument. Especially when the question answered.

I'm not downvoting you, but it's clear you're frustrated. I'm not a huge fan of Reddit's group think, either, so I understand.

I think you’re being downvoted more because of your attitude than your points, to be honest. Which isn’t necessarily Reddit bullshit, and just seems like a normal reaction.

That being said, I think a community doesn’t necessarily need to strive for eternal growth and mainstream appeal. Lemmy and the Fediverse isn’t exactly mainstream-friendly to begin with, with how confusing the whole federation concept can be to new users, and how unstable it is by nature (an instance can collapse on a whim, taking down all of its users with it).

The real question I have would be: what should be more important to these communities, keeping up growth as a priority, or focusing on the type of space that is being built instead? In a way, opening the door to Meta and other large corporate instances does have the potential to change the nature of this community, and will inevitably lead to a massive influx of users. But maybe that’s not necessarily what the community wants or needs right now.

I don’t believe in alienating Meta simply because “corporate bad”, but perhaps growth shouldn’t be a non-commercial venture’s end-all be-all. That need for eternal growth is exactly what has made plenty of social networks become hellholes devoid of any personality. Meanwhile, I’ve seen many Internet forums that never strived for mainstream appeal, and instead kept a moderately-sized and engaged userbase. It wasn’t hermetic enough to alienate new users, but also it wasn’t large enough to deplete all sense of community and civility.

I think my main issue with a potential federation with Meta isn’t that they’ll approach our communities from an exploitative perspective (like you said, they can do that anyway), but rather that most of the communities will crumble under the pressure of the massive scale of a Mainstream network. None is ready for moderating the potential huge influx of users. A lot of servers aren’t ready to handle that level of activity.

I think this is a lose-lose situation, though. Federate, and the entire ecosystem is at risk of collapsing, but defederate, and the entire ecosystem is at risk of falling to irrelevancy. Right now the existing communities should be focused on becoming their own thing and having their own attractive that can survive without depending on mainstream appeal. Mainly because most of them probably wouldn’t even be able to handle mainstream appeal.

Meta has no reason to interact with the Fediverse but personal gain. Maybe that can overlap with our goals of free speech and information someday, but defending a company right now and marketing for them, as if we need them as passive marketing, when they’re literally pushing everything that is wrong with social media and privacy rights, is beyond me.