Tbh, something like this was always going to happen when lemmy/kbin/mastodon started to gain traction. Big tech was always going to step in with their iteration of the tech and try to tell everyone “see, it’s better when WE do it!” And sure - in some ways, it is… because they probably have a team that costs millions to tens of millions annually (at least), and have probably customized the codebase in a number of ways that makes more sense for how Meta wants to run the infra and service architecture for their “instance”.
And sure… it will be better for casual users. But this migration, and the protest, and the vocal opposition before it were never really focused on casual users. This is a matter that’s been much more of a concern for mods, dedicated/power-users, and (imo, just as important as the mods) engineering contributors.
So sure, Meta’s throwing an absolute assload of money at this, because they think they can eventually end up making an even bigger assload of money. But they can only justify hiring so many engineers, and for every Real Problem they encounter will have A Solution that the product people will deem Correct.
Compare that to the larger, but more fluid, pool of technical contributors not affiliated with Meta, who don’t have to satisfy demands of Product people who may or may not know what they’re doing and how to ACTUALLY make the system better, nor with C-suite types and boards who push for constant growth, finance bitching incessantly about profitability, nor with concerns from sales and marketing about how one feature or another will impact ad revenue and user monetization.
That last bit, to me, is pretty goddamn important. Sure, this new ecosystem we’ve migrated to feels shakier and less reliable than Reddit… but Reddit was roughly the same about a decade ago. This place will get better as the community gets bigger (in all senses of what “bigger” means in the fediverse). And at its core, there’s a decentralized infrastructure that, while not outright preventing big tech from getting a slice of the pie, does make it effectively impossible for them to take over the whole shebang (and I’m sure they will try at one point or another… at which point I expect the rest of the fediverse to just go “lol no” and simply defederate the Big Tech instance(s)).
Philosophically, the ethos of this new place feels a lot closer to the “town square” ideal that every social media company says they strive for, but with one big difference: the town square here is a communal public service. It’s not ultimately owned by anyone else - it’s self-hosted by volunteers using an open-source, community-maintained and developed software suite. The point is not to make money. The point is to simply… exist.
And that’s why I think that, while Meta’s (or in the future, MS, or Apple, or Google, or Alibaba, or whoever else) instance may or may not be “bigger”, the core non-Big Tech instances will be perfectly fine in the long run. BT instances will at one point or another try some stupid user-hostile money-grab bullshit like what /u/spez and his C-suite are doing now; users will get upset; we’ll be off to the side repeating “yeah, so that’s why we’re over here in the first place”, and thus the community will grow.
Tbh, something like this was always going to happen when lemmy/kbin/mastodon started to gain traction. Big tech was always going to step in with their iteration of the tech and try to tell everyone “see, it’s better when WE do it!” And sure - in some ways, it is… because they probably have a team that costs millions to tens of millions annually (at least), and have probably customized the codebase in a number of ways that makes more sense for how Meta wants to run the infra and service architecture for their “instance”.
And sure… it will be better for casual users. But this migration, and the protest, and the vocal opposition before it were never really focused on casual users. This is a matter that’s been much more of a concern for mods, dedicated/power-users, and (imo, just as important as the mods) engineering contributors.
So sure, Meta’s throwing an absolute assload of money at this, because they think they can eventually end up making an even bigger assload of money. But they can only justify hiring so many engineers, and for every Real Problem they encounter will have A Solution that the product people will deem Correct.
Compare that to the larger, but more fluid, pool of technical contributors not affiliated with Meta, who don’t have to satisfy demands of Product people who may or may not know what they’re doing and how to ACTUALLY make the system better, nor with C-suite types and boards who push for constant growth, finance bitching incessantly about profitability, nor with concerns from sales and marketing about how one feature or another will impact ad revenue and user monetization.
That last bit, to me, is pretty goddamn important. Sure, this new ecosystem we’ve migrated to feels shakier and less reliable than Reddit… but Reddit was roughly the same about a decade ago. This place will get better as the community gets bigger (in all senses of what “bigger” means in the fediverse). And at its core, there’s a decentralized infrastructure that, while not outright preventing big tech from getting a slice of the pie, does make it effectively impossible for them to take over the whole shebang (and I’m sure they will try at one point or another… at which point I expect the rest of the fediverse to just go “lol no” and simply defederate the Big Tech instance(s)).
Philosophically, the ethos of this new place feels a lot closer to the “town square” ideal that every social media company says they strive for, but with one big difference: the town square here is a communal public service. It’s not ultimately owned by anyone else - it’s self-hosted by volunteers using an open-source, community-maintained and developed software suite. The point is not to make money. The point is to simply… exist.
And that’s why I think that, while Meta’s (or in the future, MS, or Apple, or Google, or Alibaba, or whoever else) instance may or may not be “bigger”, the core non-Big Tech instances will be perfectly fine in the long run. BT instances will at one point or another try some stupid user-hostile money-grab bullshit like what /u/spez and his C-suite are doing now; users will get upset; we’ll be off to the side repeating “yeah, so that’s why we’re over here in the first place”, and thus the community will grow.