“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.”

Companies like Meta poison everything they touch. They are a deeply evil, psychopathic organization. They are responsible for causing extremely harmful runaway effects in human society that I’m not even sure are possible to fix. The very reason for Lemmy’s recent popularity is that people are fed up with the “if something is free, you aren’t the user, you are the product” situation and its consequences (see Reddit vs. /u/spez).

Their intent to federate is a blatantly obvious attempt at an “embrace, extend, extinguish” strategy - I’m surprised anyone seriously considers federating with them. They need users to solve the “chicken and egg” problem and joining the fediverse would be an easy way for them to populate their service with content. Their motivations are obviously and transparently malicious and self-serving. They don’t care about the goals and values of the fediverse at all, all they see is an easy way to gain initial users and content. At the first moment federation will be more inconvenient than useful to them, after they sucked all the profit they could out of it, they will drop the entire thing like a hot potato, and we will be left in the dust.

I personally like this instance very much, and I’ve been putting hours and hours of work into building the AUAI community since the day I joined. But I wouldn’t hesitate for a second before deleting my account and never looking back if the community here decided to federate with Meta.

EDIT: another explanation of why they want to join the fediverse