I don’t like Meta, I don’t like Facebook and I don’t like anything Zuckerberg does, including him. But I think that we’re overreacting and creating assumptions that perhaps won’t be true.

Everyone is free to de-federate or not to de-federate from that project. But let’s think for a minute. ActivityPub projects are open source, that means that everyone can read the code of a specific project, being Mastodon or Lemmy. That won’t change, it’s not so easy, luckily for us.

Can they add on features that aren’t part of the spec? Sure, they can, but everyone is free to add those features to their projects, it’s not mandatory. Their project won’t be another Mastodon instance, or another Misskey instance, but an independent project inside ActivityPub. It’s like saying that Pleroma is Mastodon, that’s not true.

Can they cut ActivityPub support? Well, it’s their problem, ActivityPub is alive right now without their support, and we’re doing pretty well.

Will they mine everyone’s data along the way? That’s the most serious concern for me too. But unless we look at their code, we don’t know yet.

When I joined Lemmy a year ago (with another user), Lemmygrad was not my piece of cake, Lemmy.ml was too big (similar to mastodon.social), Lemmy.ca was not in my continent, and I didn’t notice about beehaw. So, sopuli was the only one standing: small, from Finland and not tankie.

Creating a instance can be difficult, but it’s a good way when you don’t like what you’re offered, and it can help other people to find their home.

There’s obviously a strong leftist culture here

That depends on what instance you create an user on. For example, Lemmygrad.ml and Lemmy.ml are not the same thing, despite both belonging to Lemmy. The issues I see are having a tankie culture, and not having more points of view.

There are less users so less content

That’s something we can help with, although it’s not so easy. I mean, the users that are already here, we can create more content and interact more with each other, so eventually more users will come. It can be boring and tiring, but it’s not impossible.

Federation is a stumbling block for many people

That’s something absolutely new for the vast majority of people. I felt myself confused the first time I joined the fediverse too. But after some time, I felt myself less confused. Some clarifications, tutorials and support can do the real trick.