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The microblogging corner of the fediverse definitely needs a bit of restructuring to make it robust against something like this. A lot of people are on larger servers that are openly inviting Meta, even excited about their arrival, and believe very strongly that the space should be completely open.
They actively speak of people not wanting to federate with everyone as trying to “destroy” the Fediverse by making people who are totally married to a non-distributed service model fear or detest the space. There are many people on their websites who think they want something like this to happen, so that “everyone” will be here, and it’ll be just like on Twitter (or something). But I don’t think they’re actually going to like it once the space is flooded with people who are jacked up on psychological manipulation and who don’t even know the rest of space exists.
The people who come to the Fediverse and stay all end up saying the same thing: “It feels like what X used to feel like”. And X used to feel that way because corporate interests weren’t pushing their anger and aggravation buttons every 15 seconds, nor that of everyone they interacted with. But the space will be dominated by people getting poked and prodded for profit, and things will turn sour.
And they might not even ever recognize why it happened, because they believe they want this.
This might all be true, but personally I don’t care about Twitter or any alternative version of “microblogging”. That’s not the kind of content or engagement that I am looking for.
If Mastodon and other instances like it throughout the Fediverse are taking the majority of Meta’s attention, even better. Let them be the army at the Black Gate distracting the Eye from two little hobbits approaching Mt Doom. Totally fine with me!
Thank you for writing multiple paragraphs explaining that you don’t care about this topic that you voluntarily clicked on, read, and engaged with.
That is very shortsighted. Just because “its twitter and microblogging” doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect someone on lemmy that doesn’t have it - people from mastodon can still read and reply to your comments there. Furthermore you yourself are on kbin that has an even larger integration with mastodon and other microblogging platforms, magazines themselves can be configured with specific tags so you get automatic engagement from other parts of the fediverse that aren’t on either lemmy or kbin.
And this is just ignoring the simple basic truth that it still affects other people that you are interacting with. Just because you don’t care doesn’t mean others don’t care, and if they leave, or want federation, or switch platforms, it affects your feed too.
This is exactly what people should be focusing on. Meta won’t do it out of charity, and it will want people hooked onto the whole “engagement metrics” philosophy that the fediverse tries to steer clear of.
I honestly hope that the top minds of the fediverse are thinking of forks, because I don’t see how this could end well.