As you've probably heard, Threads (a fairly new social network from Facebook's parent company Meta) is testing integration with the fediverse. Depending on how you look at it, it's a great opportunity, a huge threat, or both!
Back in May and June, when Threads' first announced their plans, there were quite a few polls on Mastodon about people's reactions, most showing opinions split roughly equally. How do people feel today?
For me personally there are two main forces at play here:
I generally dislike and distrust Facebook/Meta as a company, I don't use their products, and I think my life is better off because of it. I acknowledge that they have also been an accessory to a lot of toxic shit, such as political/emotional manipulation, privacy and user data violations, etc.
Having said that, as someone who values and supports the idea of a free and decentralized internet built on top of open protocols, I also recognize that it's a very good thing when some of the larger players in internet technology adopt new free and open standards like ActivityPub.
I don't really know for sure, but I'd have to guess that the venn diagram overlap of people who care about the fediverse and people who genuinely like Meta/Facebook/Instagram/etc, is pretty fucking narrow. We'd be fools to ignore the real harm that this company and the people who run it have done (or at least catalyzed). And still, it'd also be pretty unfair and ignorant to brush off the things that Meta has done that range from being harmless to even being positive, such as maintaining and committing to some very popular and important open source projects. There is some nuance here, should we choose to see it...
So when I look at it objectively I land on feeling something between skepticism and cautious optimism.
I'm perfectly willing to call Meta out for doing bad things while acknowledging when they do things that are good. And as someone who believes that centralized social media is toxic and bad, and who also believes that a federated, community-driven internet is in all of our mutual best interest, I'm willing to give Meta a chance to participate as long as they are a good faith participant (which kind of remains to be seen, of course).
From a tech standpoint, as an open protocol, I think ActivityPub will benefit when Meta and other big players adopt it.
From a cultural standpoint, I'm also pretty confident that Mastodon, Misskey, PixelFed, Lemmy, Kbin, etc., have a decent set of tools for dealing with whatever problems arise with regards to things like moderation, data scraping, EEE, etc.. Some instances will undoubtedly choose to defederate, as is their prerogative, but other instances will choose to deal with the tradeoffs of a larger userbase--and that's the Fediverse working as intended, imo.
Let's not forget war crimes and genocide.
I can see from your other post that you're talking about Facebook's role in the Rohingya Genocide in Myanmar, right? I think this part of the wikipedia article is relevant to the conversation:
Like I said above, I got off Facebook more than a decade ago and I don't use their products. As a platform it has been very well documented that Facebook has been a hive for disinformation and social unrest in [probably] every country and language on Earth. You and I might avoid Facebook and Meta like a plague, but the sad truth is that Facebook has become ubiquitous all over the world for all kinds of communication and business. Weirdos like us are here on the fediverse, but the average person has never even heard of this shit, don't you agree?
So what's my point? Why is any of that relevant?
As true as it is that Facebook was complicit in the atrocities in Myanmar (as well as social unrest and chaos on a global scale), a key component there is centralization, imo.
There are an estimated ~7,000 languages on Earth today across ~200 countries. To put it bluntly, what I'm saying is that content moderation across every language and culture on Earth is infeasible, if not straight-up impossible. Facebook will never be able to do it, nor will Google, X, Bluesky, Tiktok, Microsoft, Amazon, or any other company. In light of that it's actually shocking that Facebook had 2 Burmese speakers among their staff in the first place, considering many companies have 0. In other words, there is no single centralized social network on Earth who can combat against global disinformation, hate speech, etc. I think we can all agree to that. Hell, even Meta's staff would probably agree to that.
So what's the solution to disinformation, hate speech and civil unrest?
Frankly I'm not sure that there is one, simple solution, as the openness and freedom of the internet will always allow for someone, somewhere, to say and do bad things. But at the same time I strongly believe that federation and decentralization can be at least a part of the solution, as it give communities of every nation and language on Earth the power and agency to manage and moderate their own social networks.
I think you and I probably feel similarly about Facebook (and, for me at least, Tiktok, Instagram, X, and other toxic centralized corporate social networks that put profit about all else). After all, that's why we're talking here instead of there, right? I would much rather have everyone just leave Facebook for somewhere that is owned and controlled by individual communities. But that's simply not in our power. And so, at least as I see it, ActivityPub becoming a widely-adopted standard for inter-network communication at least creates more opportunity for decentralization and community-moderation.
As long as Facebook remains the single dominant venue for communication and news across the world (and all of those ~7000 languages), we will continue to see linguistic minorities hurt the most by disinformation and hate on the internet.
The issue with Facebook and the Rohingya isn't just that they "didn't moderate properly". It's that they knew for a long time that it was a problem and chose to ignore it. Note those last four words: chose to ignore it. In that other thing I posted I linked to someone who brought the receipts. The higher-ups at Facebook at the time knew this was happening and chose to put their corporate goals over literally tens of thousands of lives. This is inexcusable.
The simple solution is to keep Meta contained. To shun those who support it with their labour, their money, or their personal information (indirectly money). I don't want to interact with quislings and I won't. Nor should anybody else repelled at their complete and utter apathy in the face of mass murder and genocide.
(Note: Twitter was no better. Fucking Jack "Dipshit" Dorsey was in Myanmar meditating with the very same Buddhist fucks that were behind the Rohingya genocide, singing out their praises all while this was going on.)