To illustrate op’s point I’m going to spin up an instance, federate with everyone, and not tell anyone what that instance is.
Then I’m going to feed all that data into my new website, called Open Lemmy Stats, where anyone can query the user data ive accumulated. The homepage will be ripe with insights, leaderboards and all kinds of data on prolific users.
Additionally, I’ll display a snapshot/profile of a random user by feeding that users data to GPT4 to make inferences about the user’s political affiliations and display the results.
Worst of all, I’m not going to out my instance for everyone to know it as the one to defederate. In fact I’m spinning up a few instances that will host innocuous communities that I plan to mod and support to give my instances cover for their true purpose: redundant fediverse datastreams for my site, Open Lemmy Stats.
I’ll also have a store where anyone can buy my collected fediverse data for a handsome sum.
Just kidding I’m not doing any of this. But someone absolutely will or already is.
Thanks for commenting on the issue, I appreciate the communication and it seems the community feels the same.
@lwadmin@lemmy.world @michelleg@lemmy.world @ruud@lemmy.world can you let us know if you or any admins of lemmy.world took a meeting with meta or representatives of meta?
@ruud@lemmy.world runs the 6th largest mastodon instance, and fosstodon instance admins (a smaller mastodon instance), were invited to an “off the record” meeting with Meta. The fosstodon admin, Kev, declined the meeting and notified their community about the correspondence going as far as to share screenshots.
In the correspondence, the meta rep said they were reaching out to mastodon admins, so if fosstodon got an invite, logic would figure they’d invite the admin(s) of a larger instance whom also happen to admin the largest lemmy instance in the world (lemmy.world)
I would love if the same level of transparency could occur here on lemmy.world
Were you folks invited, did you take it? I would really appreciate knowing if the people who run this instance have any relationships, formal or otherwise, with meta. A lot of lemmy users are here on the fediverse to escape the reach of companies like Meta when it comes to their social media.
Obviously no one is obligated to defederate from meta/threads when the time comes. But I would like to be informed.
I think it’s important to know. I personally would like to know, I would like to make informed decisions on which instance is my home on lemmy - but without all of the info, our decisions aren’t fully informed, so I have low confidence making any decision at this point.
Finally, I’ve posed similar questions before and have been accused by other users of wanting to attack lemmy admins if they did take a meeting, or for any reason at all. That could not be further from the truth. Online harassment is harassment, and is illegal in many jurisdictions. I don’t wish any harm or ill towards anyone, including those who have different values or opinions than mine. Finally, I’ve always been cordial in my submissions on lemmy, I don’t know what would make anyone think I’d start behaving differently now.
I think these questions are important, and I intend to continue asking them until we have an answer, so that I can make a decision with confidence that I had sufficient information to do so.
I hope that seems as reasonable as I feel it is, though I could be wrong, please feel free to respond with your thoughts. I appreciate the discourse.
Thanks yall.