unerds

https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

this article here gives a pretty good rundown of the likely intent of any sort of federated integration with any meta product, with examples of the same thing happening twice before with other technologies.

supporting it puts them in a position to “help” it… as they “help” they implement new closed source features… then drop support.

much of the growth that would occur during the “support/help” phase would be on their proprietary iteration and would not benefit the fediverse.

the trajectory would likely be co-opting the fediverse, obscuring their service from the fediverse, while building their services behind closed doors, and then dropping support.

they’re recognizing the fediverse as a reasonable competitor, and this is a move intended to kill it.

for real, i’m not here because of convenience. it’s pretty inconvenient, actually.

i willingly give enough away to corporate overlords as it is… this is one of the occasions where i choose to not… despite the inconvenience.

UPDATE: Those rumours have been confirmed as at least one Mastodon admin, kev, from fosstodon.org, has been contacted to take part in an off-the-record meeting with Meta. He had the best possible reaction: he refused politely and, most importantly, published the email to be transparent with its users. Thanks kev!

kev should’ve accepted the meeting to see if they could infer the intent…

so far i think that process is going to be a bit of a barrier for the average user… so many logins. i understand that decentralization carries this burden, but i’m not sure it’s worth it for me personally, and i think i may be slightly more inclined that the average user to jump through those hoops. we shall see.