It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml admin team took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it’s users will not be allowed to proceed.
We strongly encourage other instance administrators to do the same, given the grave threat they pose to the fediverse.
Centralisation will always set in due to sheer complacency. I mean it has already happened. The main player in the reddit-like fediverse is lemmy.world
No other instance comes close to the size of lemmy.world
I also disagree with Metas method of tracking and monetising every last bit of data (I’m trying to get rid of their platforms myself) but to expect the fediverse to be a balanced mixture of access points is just daydreaming.
I don’t expect it to be balanced. I also don’t mind that a lot of users are centralized at lemmy.world - because we know the admins, and there isn’t a largescale corporation behind them that would be capable of monetizing and manipulating their userbase. The only kind of balance I want is that there isn’t an instance with multi-billion funding and teams of engineers dedicated to squeezing their userbase and monetizing every character they type. Sure, it will inevitably happen that someone from an instance would try something like this, but that’s an acceptable risk with community-run stuff and may or may not happen - and it probably won’t be as succesfull or large-scale. However, if you let in someone you are certain will do something like that, and has unimaginable amount of resources and manpower to do it, then they will just squeeze it dry while not shying away from exploiting every single privacy mistake there is in the protocol or our implementation.