app_priori

Well that's because Mastodon has many shortcomings. Like the search sucks. It's hard to find people to follow without asking people for recommendations. Mastodon is scarcely a Twitter replacement; it feels like it was built to create extremely insular communities. Like Gab and Truth Social run on Mastodon's software.

1. As if Lemmy currently isn't overrun with low effort memes? Have you seen all those cans of beans running amok here?
2. I imagine there are many parties already scraping content from the fediverse as we speak - that's the nature of public web content.

Exactly. Which is why I believe that all this fearmongering is because of Meta's reputation (rightfully so) rather than because Meta actually has a plan to destroy the fediverse. And it's not the like the fediverse can be actually destroyed, people can always start new instances at any time.

I think that article is mostly fearmongering.

Most people using Mastodon right now are not following mainstream people on their feeds - they are mostly following like-minded people who have made the switch from Twitter. If their server decides to federate with Meta, it will actually improve their experience because they can start following mainstream people from the comfort of their Mastodon feed. And if Meta decides to break ActivityPub (which I doubt), it will be back to the original status quo for most users.

And most mainstream people will not be signing up for Mastodon anyways, they will be signing up for Threads/Blue Sky.

I mean wouldn't that be not a bad thing? The people who don't want to federate will be left in their own community with their posts/content intact.

I don't think so. How would they kill the fediverse? Like there will still many communities that will not federate with Meta and still continue to operate as usual.

Ever heard of Mastodon blocklists? I mean defederation has been happening for a while.

But I think that's fine. Instances should have every right to block instances that they disagree with.

You can already donate to the people operating this instance. No subscriptions needed, just donate away.

Just because something's not corporate owned doesn't mean bad actors can come onto this platform. I've seen some unsavory people here already.

That's because Mastodon is a federated Twitter clone. If you never used Twitter to begin with (which is really for professionals/celebrities/famous people to put out public messages to people), then you won't get it. Most people don't need to use Twitter or anything like it.

Let instance owners make that choice for themselves. I don't like how people are adopting peer pressure to prevent instance owners from doing what they want with their instances. If instance owners want to federate with Meta, let them do so. It's important to educate people on the pros and cons of federating with Meta instead of pressuring them not to federate with Meta at all.

I don't use Twitter, so no. But normies will finally have a potentially credible Twitter replacement that's open to the public, so good for them.