Tl:dr: Perhaps I am just uninformed on the issues, but I don’t see what the big deal is with a company like Meta joining the fediverse. If anything, I think it is a very good thing, as it puts more attention and dev time into making it a more functional and better place. So what is the issue?
I personally joined the fediverse because of the structure of it. It cannot be owned by a single company or person, and there will always be a lot of diversity and customizability to how you interact with people and control your data. If people don’t like a particular platform, they don’t have to use it. They can join platforms that defederate from areas of the fediverse they wish to stay away from. That cannot and will not change, just because of how it is built from the ground up.
So enter Threads, and I am starting to see a lot of fear and concern over this. I don’t get why this is. It’s not like the fediverse is owned by Meta now. They are just one more player in hopefully an ever growing list of major organizations joining the fediverse. Ideally, I would like to see as much of the internet using the fediverse as possible. It is how the internet should work overall, and I think the specific issues with a company should not detract from the benefits of them joining.
However, maybe I’m missing something. Is there good reason to be concerned or warry of a company like meta starting an app like threads? What are the major drawbacks and concerns here? Is it being blown out of proportion, or is there actually something to worry about?
I think we need forums to come back. I am beginning to think the Fediverse has a big hole in it. It’s hard to ignore the Zuckerbergs of the world that show up to a poor sys admins house with a bag of money. I think we are going to need a feed aggregator that has a charter that says that profit is not the main focus of the service but supporting a community is , and the community is protected from Ads or Data collection as much as is possible.
I mean, nothing is stopping you creating or joining an instance of lemmy that has a charter like that? You could very easily never federate the corpo instances. Astroturfing could still be an issue, but it’s likely you’d never get big enough for that to be an issue.