I’m struggling to think of another government that is more hostile to Americans than the US government.

Just because my government has a list of enemies, doesn’t mean they’re my enemies too.

The free market will provide guillotines if the people truly want them. /s

When democrats go to the right on issues, they don’t attract republican voters. What happens instead is that republicans go even farther right in order to differentiate themselves from democrats.

Banning Israeli contributers too?

Awesome, saved.

I appreciate it. I have all my stuff at home running on Yunohost. I’m quite happy with it, but I have tried docker-based projects in the past including dockstarter. I always ended up confused. I don’t have much extra time at the moment for messing with it again, but it’s very kind of you to offer.

It’s hard for me. I’ve tried, but not had much success.

I wish it didn’t require docker :(

They all have some kind of backdoors that governments exploit. If I could buy a phone and use it knowing that only the Chinese government could spy on me with it, I would absolutely get that. I live in the US though. If I lived in China I would prefer the US-only spy phone.

I used to have a certificate of membership from the Flat Earth Society (circa 1995). I don’t know what happened to it.

Yup, that is how it works, and how Facebook will exploit that openness. I only hope that more people will come around to my point of view and refuse to engage with hostile networks like Facebook.

Enshittification is what happens when companies have to really start making money. They often lose money in the race to build up a strong userbase. Once they have that, they start ruining the experience by showing too many ads and/or charging for access. Facebook isn’t going to invest in federation if it doesn’t have a very solid plan, devised by a huge team of well-paid professionals, to protect and grow its profit margin. Anything they touch will enshittify eventually.

Network effects are already in play even before Facebook adopts federation. I, like many others here have sacrificed the convenience of a Facebook network for a better alternative. The fediverse is growing in spite of it’s disadvantage in terms of network effect. Let Facebook die of enshittification and it’s users will find the alternatives. Rather than “direct combat” with the giant, I prefer to say “the only winning move, is not to play”.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. I will personally not be on any fediverse instance that federates with threads.

Normally companies like Facebook just buy their competition, and either kill it or control it. They can’t buy activity pub so this is their strategy instead. Their goal is still the same: kill or control. Why on earth would you want to partner with someone who has that attitude towards you?

Say threads has like 100 million users. Your instance federates with 1 million users. Then you federate with threads so now you federate with 101 million. You get some new users by saying “hey check it out, interact with Facebook without having an account there”. Later you decide to defederate from threads and go back to your 1 or 1.1 million users. Who is going to stay on your instance? Anyone attracted by federation with Facebook is going to leave, along with any existing users that got used to/enjoyed federating with Facebook.

Ah but then it’s too late. You think you are going to eat facebook’s lunch, but it’s gonna be the other way around.

The fediverse is not “an emerging market”. It is in fact, competing for market share with the likes of Facebook. They don’t give a shit about the technology, they just need the users. They feel threatened that people are jumping ship, and the best thing they can think to do is make sure they own the alternatives. Facebook will use its size and power to essentially turn mastodon into a Facebook client. In some ways I admire your optimistic outlook, but I cannot share it.

We are siphoning users off corporate platforms already. Almost everyone on the fediverse has left those networks to come here. They did it without Facebook or twitter federation, and people will continue to do that without Facebook or twitter federation.

Threads absolutely not “reshape” itself to fit the fediverse. They are playing to win, and winning for them means mass collection of analytics and social graphs to sell micro-targeted ads to their customers.

The fediverse is growing at the right speed, IMO, and inviting Facebook in to play, in the hopes of luring a few users is a bargain with the devil.