I am sure this might have been mentioned by someone else but my concern - someone that is financially motivated and saavy could work on becoming one of the larger instances in hopes Meta will buy them out. Similar to a startup, make a good product (community) and hope to get bought out for big bucks.
This means we need to trust instance owners and they in turn, as they get larger, need to be over transparent of their motivations, goals, and actions
Quesion: I don’t know if the tech limits this, but if an instance owner flips to the dark side- could past posts and content be opened up for Meta mandated data scraping? Or would any code change like that not be retroactive? Aka if we select an instance that turns bad could we be feeding the machine in the future without knowing it today?
Great article, interesting take. Feels wierd but am gasp optimistic now?!