Since news leaked out 2 days ago that Facebook has approached Mastodon developers and admins - requiring non-disclosure agreements first - the whole microverse (i.e. mastodon / pleroma etc, the micro-blogging part of fedi) has been talking about nothing but that and Facebook’s imminent entry into the fediverse with an as yet not clearly defined entity called Barcelona or p92. This woud be very roughly comparable to Reddit saying they are going to federate with lemmy.
Yet here on lemmy I could only find a relatively small discussion.
https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/62958
Did the lemmyverse not know or just not care that much?
it’s an interesting development that will have a direct impact on lemmy since mastodon and lemmy users can interact with each other.
time will tell how closely they follow microsoft’s old “embrace, extend, extinguish” game plan for combatting open standards. who knows? maybe they will be good faith actors in this new space, or won’t be able to gain enough user share to truly do nasty stuff.
My [paranoid] take: its vaporware designed to distract from the reddit fiasco, with plans fo mr meta to later absorb reddit instead of a reddit IPO. Reddit users are very different than Twitter users; the mass exodus didn’t happfrom Twitter to Mastodon, but looks very promising from reddit to lemmy/kbin. And it takes only one social media giant to crumble for the rest to follow. Once people are on Fediverse there is no going back
I think it has absolutely nothing to do with Reddit and everything to do with Twitter.
I think they scrambled to get something up and running quickly so they could get the wave of disgruntled Twitter users and jumpstart a new social media for them, and the only feasible option in 5 months was to use Mastodon/Activitypub to get there.
It will be interesting to see how much they give back to the community and if they federate.
probably an unpopular opinion but facebook does also have a sort of track record of contributing to open source projects in ways that benefit everyone. facebook wanted to use subversion (or some other non-git source control) and contributed significantly so that it would work great for huge repositories like theirs. and facebook use memcached for their caches and contribute heavily so that they can use it more efficiently.
i’m also skeptical about end motivations, but in terms of being able to lend engineering effort to open source projects and helping to create a better product for all, it’s not such a bad idea.
At least it’s not a bad idea until they leverage those tools they helped develop to takeover or dissolve services. I think it’s about time we start learning our lesson with these big corps rather than trying to give them a chance.
I hear you. I could imagine that the biggest “threat” is that facebook comes out with some incredible contributions and features, but it requires modifying activitypub or in some way restricts instances that want those tools from collaborating with the rest of the fediverse. Causing a fediverse split between those who want meta’s features, and are willing to fall under meta’s control, and those who would rather not have them could be bad.
Google has a similar reputation and yet XMPPs half rotten corpse is still floating down the river
personally, as one of the people who has come over from reddit very recently, i don’t really see it as being my place to comment on it and at any rate there are many other people saying the exact same as me anyway. screw zuckerberg, he doesn’t deserve to share in what other people have built here.
If it ends up bad for the overall environment of the fediverse, they’ll just get defederated. A lot of the folks on Mastadon are getting worked up because the identity of this corner of the internet is decidedly anti-corporate. The thing is, it’s just a few clicks for any instance-owner to completely isolate that project.
It could be a big deal (initially), or it could be a giant nothingburger. Or it could be a big deal that eventually turns into a nothingburger. Too soon to say, and way too soon to throw a fit over.
I’m all for anything that will provide an avenue for people to move off of corporate platforms. The average user doesn’t care, but for some of the more tech-savvy FB/Insta/WhatsApp users who join it could be an interesting way to get their feet wet and maybe look to move to alternate platforms without leaving their contact behind completely.
