So, recently some fediverse admins (mostly Mastodon) and the founder of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko (Gargron), where contacted by Meta/Facebook for an NDA meeting. We know nothing about it, but we’re pretty sure that it was about this project92 thing that Meta/Facebook is creating to “compete” with Twitter.
So a lot of Mastodon admins already singed a pact to immediately block any Meta/Facebook activity in the fediverse as soon as it comes up. My Mastodon instance, fosstodon.org hasn’t singed that pact and I’m pretty worried.
The following image is an screenshot of Gargron and dansup (creator of Pixelfed) talking about this. These posts were deleted, even from the wayback machine.
I don’t know that it’s much of a reason to panic.
I expect they’ll defederate themselves when they move to ActivityPub in order to make it look like it’s not “part of some larger network”, a lot like how TruthSocial is basically a Mastodon instance.
Obviously, we don’t know much about what was said or signed, but I really doubt it’s anything super concerning.
This reminds me a bit of when people discover who contributes a significant amount of code to the Linux kernel. Google, Microsoft, Intel, etc.
As much as I hate Facebook, they’re not dumb when it comes to software. React has significant adoption and Zstd is a great compression algorithm, which they also developed in-house.
And while they weren’t involved, the lead designer of Btrfs worked on a lot of it while he was at Facebook (I think they now also use it as their primary filesystem, I don’t remember).
Basically, relax. Everything’s going to be fine.
There’s no reason for Meta to use ActivityPub and then immediately defederate. They’re trying to build a Twitter competitor, and they know they can’t with an empty service.
ActivityPub gives them access to content immediately. And they’re clearly meeting with large instance owners in order to ensure they won’t just block them. They don’t need the small sites to be on board, just the ones with 100s of thousands of users.
Once they have drawn a large enough number of prominent Twitter users and a good following of normies, they can take or leave the rest of the network.
Maybe there may well need to be a financial relationship tool. The major instances will have costs associated with Facebook users if federation happened. They could simply say, you pay your way we will not block you.
One issue with the Fediverse is someone has to pay. All the users coming from Reddit right now. They should be donating to their sites to cover the huge influx. It costs money.
