Why are people against big companies joining the fediverse?

Tl:dr: Perhaps I am just uninformed on the issues, but I don't see what the big deal is with a company like Meta joining the fediverse. If anything, I think it is a very good thing, as it puts more attention and dev time into making it a more functional and better place. So what is the issue?

I personally joined the fediverse because of the structure of it. It cannot be owned by a single company or person, and there will always be a lot of diversity and customizability to how you interact with people and control your data. If people don't like a particular platform, they don't have to use it. They can join platforms that defederate from areas of the fediverse they wish to stay away from. That cannot and will not change, just because of how it is built from the ground up.

So enter Threads, and I am starting to see a lot of fear and concern over this. I don't get why this is. It's not like the fediverse is owned by Meta now. They are just one more player in hopefully an ever growing list of major organizations joining the fediverse. Ideally, I would like to see as much of the internet using the fediverse as possible. It is how the internet should work overall, and I think the specific issues with a company should not detract from the benefits of them joining.

However, maybe I'm missing something. Is there good reason to be concerned or warry of a company like meta starting an app like threads? What are the major drawbacks and concerns here? Is it being blown out of proportion, or is there actually something to worry about?

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Those of us who are of a certain age have seen this happen before. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, some big companies like Compuserve and Prodigy and AOL became service providers and offered customers access to their own content, as well as a "gateway" to the internet. They weren't the only service providers, but they made access to the internet much easier for less technical people, and they had reach. AOL is infamous for its mail marketing campaign where they blasted copies of their software to everyone on CDs.
That brought a whole new segment of the population onto the internet who didn't have the same culture or capabilities or interest in building a high-quality community. Usenet forums were particularly impacted. Longtime users coined a term that is still used today to describe this phenomenon: Eternal September. Why September? Because prior to all of this, the only time the forums had to deal with inexperienced, uncouth users was in September, when a new batch of first-year college students got access to the internet and found their way to Usenet.
Right now Lemmy is peopled with the high-quality user base that wants to improve the community. Threads threatens to (and will) open the floodgates of people who may not share those interests.
- I snapped so many of those discs into tiny fragments to make mirror murals back in the day. They were absolutely everywhere.
  
  I glued the label sides together to make shiny coasters. (Edit: typo)
- Thank you, this definitely makes sense. Hopefully the more decentralized format that the fediverse is taking will ensure that small high quality communities will still be able to thrive, but I do see the threat that larger corporations play.
  Is there no way to ensure that the community remains high quality? What measures can be taken? Defederation? Education?

Facebooks only reason to make Threads a ActivityPub compatible application is likely to not be considered a so called gatekeeper by the EU. That's all. No secret plot to destroy the fediverse.
The main thing I worry about is that Instagram users get into the fediverse, and they are just so incredibly bland. What kind of people think posting a picture of their face while being on some place is peak social interaction.
- I think Meta is looking at anyway to extend the lifespan of Facebook, or the lucrative services underneath, and what better way then to jump on the fediverse and make themselves the biggest player in the pool?

This article does a pretty good job of explaining why it's not a good thing.

Honestly, I'm tired of corporate social media, and it's integration with ActivityPub is the last thing I want for the platform. I don't want "big" social media accounts ran by social media management teams, posting advertisements and "content". I don't want to see how many likes or boosts a post got, or to see celebrities show up in my TL. All that corporate social media like Threads will do by federating, is shove that kind of "content" onto people's TL's unless they defederate from them, as well as all the data collection that comes along with corporate social media.
And, unfortunately, for those that USE Threads, they're at best getting a worse experience of the fediverse than they could be.
- 100% agree. I'm here for genuine community interactions

Aside from EEE as someone else posted, for me it's also about companies like Meta just polluting the general space with their nonsense. They already turned traditional social media into a toxic ad-filled hellhole, which is why I abandoned it and came somewhere more chill. They apparently can't be content with dominating that space and allowing an alternative to exist, so now they want to start turning the fediverse into Facebook as well.
Some of us just want to chatter about nerd crap without being used as an audience for influencers and marketers, which is undoubtedly what Meta would bring with it.
- That's what it really comes down to, they won't allow competitors to exists. If they join us here, they won't be cooperative, theyll be competitive.

Even if you don't mind the insidious invasions of privacy that these companies have undertaken with relentless determination:
Because everything these companies touch, they sooner or later enshittify.
Because the past decade has shown that Facebook's intentions cannot be trusted.

I fail to see a reason for Meta to be an ActivityPub peer except to stifle growth of our open source network of communities. Big Tech want silos.

People aren't against companies, people are against Meta. In the wider fediverse, anyway.
A while back there was talk of Tumblr potentially joining the fediverse, and it was met with neutral to positive reactions. No idea what happened there, maybe they're still working on it, but I do not expect a "fedipact against tumblr" to gain as much steam (if any) when they decide to announce they're ready to flip the ActivityPub switch.
(no idea if my other comment got sent out, this may be a duplicate)
- I'm guessing when that happened, there were also far less users on the fediverse.

I escaped from Twitter, now from Reddit, do you wanna make me go away from here too?
- I think we need forums to come back. I am beginning to think the Fediverse has a big hole in it. It's hard to ignore the Zuckerbergs of the world that show up to a poor sys admins house with a bag of money. I think we are going to need a feed aggregator that has a charter that says that profit is not the main focus of the service but supporting a community is , and the community is protected from Ads or Data collection as much as is possible.
  
  I mean, nothing is stopping you creating or joining an instance of lemmy that has a charter like that? You could very easily never federate the corpo instances. Astroturfing could still be an issue, but it's likely you'd never get big enough for that to be an issue.

That you, Zuck?

I think we need blocklists that servers can opt into. My fear is that users use Meta's version because it's simpler (or appears simpler) and the federation centralizes.

The issue is that your and our version of "it" (the fediverse) is most definitely not the same as Meta's version, where they are the center of the universe and all our communities revolve around them.

I just spent 20 minutes typing out a reply, and accidentally swiped down, deleting the whole thing. I’m not typing it again, sorry.

28 comments