Everywhere I look there are people advocating for defederation from this and that! Do you even understand what you’re suggesting? Do you get what’s the point of decentralized social media and activity pub?
This is supposed to be free and accessible for everyone. We all have brains and can decide who to interact with.
If meta or any other company manages to create a better product it’s just natural that people tend to use it. I won’t use it, you may not use it and it’s totally fine! It’s about having options. Also as Mastodon’s CEO pointed out there’s no privacy concern, everything stays on your instance.
Edit: after reading and responding to many comments, I should point out that I’m not against defederation in general. It’s a great feature if used properly. Problem is General Instances with open sign-ups and tens of thousands of users making decisions on par of users and deciding what they can and can not see.
If you have a niche or small community with shared and agreed upon values, defederating can be great. But I believe individual users are intelligent enough to choose.
There has to be a middle ground. Applying to be in communities sounds good but what’s the point of a public forum that isn’t public. At some point if you continually defederate others, don’t you become the defederated one?
I think that defederation is the middle ground.
One extreme is The Algorithm tells you who you’re going to talk to, and shoves junk at you nonstop, and the other is that you have to just accept and filter through whatever gets posted with no filtering at all.
Defederation puts the control back in the hands of, if not the users, then at least the administrators and mods of a community; if you can control who can see your content, and what posts you see then and only then do you own the platform instead of being a faceless number that’s only there to be shoved into a dashboard to calculate your revenue value.
One could argue that there is actually less transparency from an admin than there is from a corporation. An admin has complete control over an instance and zero oversight if they want to be shitty without being caught. Ideally the “hive mind” would weed this out and defederation IS a tool to deal with it, but the control argument can go both ways. In all cases we start by trusting the controller is acting in our best interests and need ways of handling things when trust is broken. Defederation, as the sole tool, might be too heavy handed.