Short sighted mistake. Terrible Idea.
Adopt, Extend, Destroy Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. That’s the game plan. It’s worked so many times in the past.
It only works if people stop using Mastodon once Threads stops federating. ActivityPub is dead they will say.
When the big corporations leave people just need to reist the “oh the user numbers are so small now, the Fediverse must be outdated” fallacy. Just like XMPP. Still works great, we just need people to use it instead of the silos which are popular now.
They don’t need to do that when the fedi is a thousandth of the size of their social networks lol. It’s hilarious that you think they need our user base.
It’s not so much about wanting this user base as it is eliminating potential competition and maybe stamping out a place on the internet where people can freely and openly communicate.
You can’t really Embrace, Extend, Extinguish an open standard. Anybody can continue to use the unextended version and that’s exactly what would happen if Meta tried it. They can’t force servers to update or implement meta-specific features
You could say the same thing about any EEE strategy against anything not proprietary. However, evidently it works.
No it doesn’t because you can’t extinguish a publically available standard when anybody can write their own software. XMPP is the horror story used to warn about EEE, but it still exists. The fediverse is a small network right now. If Meta tried to EEE it, server admins who don’t want to participate in a Meta-controlled network would not implement Meta’s extensions. The network would splinter into a Meta-fediverse and the actual fediverse, which would be smaller than it is now but still exist as a free and open network that could continue to grow.
They can’t turn off our servers, or force us to implement their tech, or stop us from implementing freedom/privacy preserving features.
EDIT: The reason EEE did so much damage to XMPP was because most users weren’t aware of it. XMPP got so big because non-tech savvy users didn’t even know they were using it. So when Google starting phasing it out users didn’t even realize it, they only maybe realized they couldn’t talk to one or two people now. But the fediverse has always been an explicit alternative to corporate social media and advertised that it is built on open standards that are not controlled by corporations. Its one of the key factors in a lot of the userbase’s decision to be here. If a split were to happen, that would leave the remaining open fediverse still large enough to sustain itself (even if its smaller than it is at this moment).
