Everyone is talking about how Meta is trying to Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish the Fediverse. Meta won’t be alone for long in this goal, there will be a lot of capitalist actors that would try to do the same in the long run.

Defederation with them will be a shot in the leg, and handicap the Fediverse movement itself. There will be users/instances in the current Fediverse that would want to federate with them, and banning such instances would create silos and echo chambers.

The way out of this is to focus on the 2nd E - “Extend”. I think we can all agree that UX of Threads app will always probably be the best out of all the federated instances. But that is something that people can still live without. Before long, Meta will tout shortcomings like lack of E2E encryption in the private messages and some other core features, that will create a bigger divide amongst ourselves. The Fediverse developers and community have to keep abreast of Meta on such core features, so that they can never extend the core of the Fediverse.

Let me know of your thoughts!

  • Contramuffin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    I’m not sure I totally agree with that assessment. If we compare the sheer amount of resources and talent behind Meta vs. behind the Fediverse, it’s clear that there’s no way the Fediverse can ever compete in terms on innovation and features. Not to say that there aren’t talented devs on the Fediverse - they’re all pretty talented if you ask me - but Meta can just hire hundreds of similarly talented devs without even feeling the cost.

    Really, the only way to prevent getting washed away by Meta (in development, in users, in culture, in basically just about everything) is to not associate with Meta at all. Co-existence doesn’t mean we have to cooperate, after all. If the Fediverse shows that it has the userbase and staying power to withstand a full EEE “assualt” and remain standing, then I would be more inclined to take the “wait and see” approach. But I think as it stands now, Meta is very clearly trying to overwhelm the Fediverse before it has a chance to get going on its own merits

    • Magiwarriorx@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I honestly don’t think Meta even cares about the Fediverse as we know it. Mastodon barely cracked 2.5m active monthly users in late 2022/early 2023, and the Fediverse user counts had been dropping until the Reddit debacle. There’s no way they are agile enough to push this out the door in response to what happened in June, and this is a lot of effort to kill something already in decline with only 0.01% your active monthly user base.

      Even so, what do they gain by killing Mastodon? Paying for the dev work and the server cost to host their own instance? All the data on the Fediverse that they’d want to sell is publicly accessible anyway; they could grab/sell it all without going through this effort. I think they see long term value in the ActivityPub protocol, and they are positioning themselves to get ahead of any other major corporate ActivityPub-based platform.

      I suspect the intention is that if another major platform appears (BlueSky, anyone?) that it will pressure them to also implement ActivityPub, thereby increasing the pool of data on the Fediverse and letting Meta analyze and sell it too.