I think most of us who moved here from Reddit are enjoying our time here on kbin.social. We’ve left a lot of the riff-raff behind us and made new friends with intelligent, thoughtful members of kbin, Lemmy, Mastodon, etc…
But we need to spread out.
Not only have we stressed the server with thousands of immigrating users, but we were being watched by darker forces, namely Meta and Instagram.
A quick search of the net will show that we were not the first mass-migration. The first migration was last year when people from ‘the bird site’ (rhymes with jitter) fled Elon Musk’s new regime. Most of those people moved to Mastodon.
We largely moved to kbin. Kbin.social to be more exact.
I’m a member of both Mastodon and kbin, and a couple of posts shocked me. The first one about Meta I have found again:
https://mastodon.social/@gnarkotics/110568580882355105
The second one about Instagram I have failed to locate, but the gist was that Instagram had reached out to one of the larger Fediverse servers and asked the person who runs to have a meeting ‘off the record’. That person turned them down and told other members of the Fediverse what happened. The general consensus is that this was going to be a monetary offer to allow Instagram to further colonize the Fediverse by purchasing one of the larger servers.
And therein lies the problem: if the majority of users gravitate to a few large servers, then that leaves those larger servers vulnerable to exploitation.
I, as a recent immigrant, did not understand this. I thought that, intuitively, we should all gather in one place and grow the server. It’s the exact opposite. We need to spread out to smaller instances. This didn’t really register with me until I spoke with this person.
https://fedi.getimiskon.xyz/objects/77a0f3cd-6f31-42f7-a3ea-29af8b25c0b3
Remember too that having an account on a smaller instance still allows us to see everything on kbin.social. For example, look at this:
We are looking at a mixture of posts from Lemmy and kbin.
Moving to a smaller instance does not limit your interactions. What damages the fediverse is people trying to recreate all of Reddit on one instance.
TLDR: If you like it here, the best thing you can do for the fediverse right now is to set up on one of the less populous instances.
I invite correction and clarifications.
EDIT: Adding further sources below.
Meta/Facebook is inviting Fediverse admins under NDA for “meetings” (mstdn.social)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384207
Facebook, Inc. is planning to join the Fediverse. How do we make it lose as much money as possible?
https://www.loomio.com/d/QoH98Gg6/facebook-inc-is-planning-to-join-the-fediverse-how-do-we-make-it-lose-as-much-money-as-possible
Beware Of Meta Offering Gifts To Mastodon
https://medium.com/nextwithtech/beware-of-meta-offering-gifts-to-mastodon-6adb317e039d
Meta vs Mastodon: Battle for the Future of Decentralized Social Media
https://marketingnewscanada.com/news/meta-vs-mastodon-battle-for-the-future-of-decentralized-social-media
Legal-Copyright discussion from Mastodon yesterday
ttps://mas.to/@franktaber/110602489997086618
And a cartoon to boot
People need to just chill out and touch some grass.
Like how long have you been on the internet? If the whole federation thing can be bought out by a company and ruined, then it’s a failed experiment and we move on to the next thing. It’s a tale as old as the internet itself, cool grassroots thing gets popular, sells out, destroys itself, repeat every few years.
For now, kbin and lemmy are working, but don’t think this will last forever or won’t get tested. Either the concept is good and it will stand the test of corporate takeover, or it won’t and we try something else.
And that’s a strawman. It’s getting very reddity in here.
No, we shouldn’t just passively observe the experiment either fail or succeed by its own pre-existing state. We should actively engineer our behavior and connections to avoid the slimey tentacles of corporate manipulation.