Thank you and the other admins for the thoughtful and transparent answer.
We would like to express our disappointment with the negative and threatening tone of some of these discussions
Considering that a great percentage of the Fediverse userbase are ex-users of Reddit and Twitter that left due to CEO actions, I get that they (including me) don't trust Meta or want anything to do with them. I agree that discussion should be civil nonetheless.
You may find confusing how there could be at the same communities (subreddits) with the same name in different instances. You can use the Lemmy Community Browser to find communities easily among different instances.
You're posts are visible from other Fediverse sites, like Mastodon or Kbin and you can interact with their users.
An user or an instance can block users or instances. If you have an account on lemmy.world and the instance admins blocks another instance you won't be able to see the posts or comments made from their users.
Is there anything in particular that you want to know?
It's not about the data they can collect. As long as we don't use the Meta app or register in their instance we're on the clear. The problem is giving them power.
I'm not an evil genius shithead like Zuck, but it could go this way:
They enter the Fediverse as the biggest instance.
They artificially slow down connections with other instances. That way, lots of users from smaller intances will migrate to the Meta one. Only the ones concerned about our privacy will remain in independent instances.
Once most of the userbase of the Fediverse is on their instance, they keep slowing it, or adding "features" only available in their app, effectively building a wall between them and the rest of instances.
Finally they defederate, leaving the rest of the fediverse weaker than it was.
The problem with Meta is that they will harm the Fediverse.
I found this article interesting, written by a dev who worked with google during the XMPP EEE and was originally a XMPP dev, thinking that a big company could only mean more success for the FOSS alternative. He was wrong.
I'm using Fedora and I'm really happy with it. Pretty solid distro,