I think some people are being too fatalist.
Something I liked about reddit was that it was neither Twitter nor Facebook.
If Meta creates its own proprietary version of the fediverse, it doesn’t really change a thing. I’ll just stick to instances that defederate them. After all, there is no Threads right now, and the fediverse is doing well.
Agreed. EEE, at the end of the day means using your superior resources to build attractive features that lure the market away from the “vanilla” FOSS project and into your proprietary ecosystem.
Are current fediverse users likely to be lured to Facebook by cool features? NO
Almost all of us are here because we no longer want to participate in the centralized corporate social media machine. The only thing FB could do to “extend” activitypub in a way that interests me is to not use it at all.
If you though Mastodon was gonna “win” the microblog wars, condolences, I can see why this is upsetting. That doesn’t mean they can somehow come in and ruin what it is right now.
Further, I am very dubious that Threads is going to federate with existing servers. When they talk about a fediverse, they are talking about a network of services that they have full control over. Insta and FB are going to get activitypub support and the new “zukkit” link aggregator will be announced within a year.
If Meta creates its own proprietary version of the fediverse, it doesn’t really change a thing
anytime Meta touches anything, they turn it into shit, haven’t you learned that by now?
My point is that if they fuck up and tamper the protocol with their bullshit, it doesn’t matter because there will always be folks who refuse to participate in their shenanigans and just keep their instances out of reach. Plus I’d rather not interact with the Facebook crowd, so it’s a win-win situation.
I will never trust Facebook ever.
it will matter though if a significant amount of users / communities is on their instances, if that happens and people then decide to defederate, that means the resulting community will be much smaller. Perhaps even so much smaller that it will eventually become a ghost town. It wouldn’t be the first time something like that happens!
given that we know Meta is not to be trusted at all, it stands to reason to never allow them to grow big enough inside the fediverse that the aforementioned scenario could happen
This is a reasonable response if you look at this situation in a vacuum. But sadly the open source community got burned a bunch of times already by big private corps. Of course they dont destroy all open source. If it helps them they actually help develop it and only try to overtake it in the democratic sense to gain the most voting and controlling power. But Facebook is absolutely not in a benefit of the doubt situation. They need to show a hell of a lot of good faith and need to be a tiny enough fraction of the userbase in the fediverse to be trusted in my opinion.
Got some examples? And please, something other than xmpp. That feel apart under it’s own weight.
When it comes to open source and open standards, Facebook have done quite a lot. React, react native, llama, graphql, relay, pytorch, docosaurus, zstd, flipper, redux, infer, lexical, jsx and a lot more at https://GitHub.com/facebook
Facebook have already contributed a lot to open source and open standards. Why do you say they won’t continue to do that?
