I’ve been reading up on this very thing today. Let me put it to you in paraphrase as I heard it. What we have to lose is a truly federated network - it has happened before, and it can happen again. Facebook, when faced with an app that most users preferred, chose to buy it, and now Instagram is just as big a project concern as the rest of Meta.
You can’t buy a federated network, but you sure can improve on it, just as Google did with XMPP in days of yore. Once a federated chat protocol much as we’re on a federated social network, Google introduced Google Talk in 05, and federated it via XMPP in 06. They introduced a variety of features and QOL over the years, and being as big as they were, they held a vast majority of the users across all XMPP platforms.
Then, in 2013, they announced that Google Talk would be phased out and as a result, a huge chunk of the federated community would be walled. All of a sudden, a thriving federated community was mostly just Google.
People join just to talk to their friends, and to make friends; if most of those people went to Google for their features and most of their friends were there too, there was no big loss for them. It’d be like if Reddit used to be an instance all on its own and then suddenly decided to unfederate completely.
That’s not to say that all this will happen with Meta, but I guarantee that is their goal.
I use Sync and saw someone suggest to the developer (who is adapting the app to Lemmy) that when the app stops working, it leaves a message indicating that Lemmy is a possible alternative. Not to say that suggestion will be taken, but I think it’s entirely possible that a decent chunk of basically uninformed users will find their favorite app inoperable and find themselves, directly or indirectly, referred to Lemmy.
I disagree; while this is a critical juncture, experimentation is absolutely necessary. Whether a push to expand the user base/migrate from failing centralized services succeeds or fails, this is where lines get drawn and precedent gets set. An instance must be free to defederate from another instance, just as a user must be free to leave and pick up an account on another instance, should they disagree with the decision.
To summarize: the video opens on a series of games, each one progressively older, overlaid with a review of that game from the time it came out praising it as the best graphical fidelity of its time. Basically, they’re saying “Yes, graphics got better, but we always seem to conclude that they’re the best they will ever be”