I think it’s pretty safe to say that the majority of us are here to avoid another corporate takeover of our preferred platforms. It would seem to me to be a tad irresponsible to allow Facebook into our space with open arms, allowing them to hoover up our data. I would love to keep using Lemmy.world, but will happily change instances if need be, and I feel many share that sentiment.
I’m of two minds about this. I have no love for Facebook and Zuk can go fuck himself. I want Lemmy to be free of the same fucks that ruined Reddit and formally corporatized it.
At the same time, I want Lemmy to grow. I don’t want this to be our little corner of the Internet that’s tucked away. I don’t want an information bubble. I want to see user-managed spaces like this grow and overtake the corporate ones.
So I choose to stay neutral. The two philosophies I described are at odds with each other here. I’ll go with what the majority decides – that’s the whole point of it being user-managed after all. I’ll just say that I think we should give ourselves options to reverse and monitor any changes as time goes on. We need to see how things progress, regardless of what decision we make, so we can course correct if necessary.
I feel strongly that we should defederate, but i really like your reasoning for being neutral. The fediverse is currently a small community of advanced internet users who see themselves as separate from mainstream users, and the temptation is to gatekeep.
I can understand this perspective: wanting to spread the gospel of federation, etc.
But I’m starting to come around to the realization that the growth mindset is rotten. It’s what leads to these big centralized/unified platforms that concede on their core in order to reach a wider audience.
I can’t blame corpos for conceding away all identity, because engagement is how they make money, but what’s our excuse?
These aren’t refugees. They’re free to make a lemmy or masto or whatever account any time they want. We don’t have a problem with most of the people. It’s the platform, and all the fucking out and proud racists who are on it.
It’s interesting, because wanting to grow to supersede the corporations can become just like the corporations wanting to grow for profit. The ends don’t justify the means here.
The idea would be that as people here and see about it more, more people would join, but there’s a lot of assumptions baked into that, including that these people are actually people you want on the platform. Like you mention at the end, racists are going to find a “corporate, government free” space to be their own paradise. And we can’t let that happen.
I wonder if this would be possible: content from Facebook is not shown on Lemmy, but content from Lemmy can be shown on Facebook. Facebook users can join Lemmy, but there’s an application process for them so we can vet them.
I’m fine with however things end up, but I do want us to keep in mind that we risk becoming too insular and developing a groupthink. I don’t think it would be a danger to society like conservative ones tend to become, but I don’t want to think Jill Stein has huge support because Lemmy castigates anyone else, for instance.
I don’t think we’re in that position right now, but it’s one to be wary of.