this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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I agree with him completely, why are people so he'll bent on fear mongering this? The worst possible outcome is that the fedi will... be exactly the same as it is now lol.
Meta doesn't care about the Fedi population, they're not even 1% of their userbase, and they know that the fedi crowd is one of the most anti people of their network.
There is no embrace-extend-extinguish. If Meta starts to change up the ActivityPub protocol and then make it proprietary, then networks like Lemmy and Mastodon will just stay on the original one. They can't force the fedi to follow, and they know this.
They can't inject ads or data scrape more then they already can. Your public info is already public, which can be assumed that it can and is being scraped. This exact comment is one of them. They can scrape your info the exact same as they can now.
This will introduce more people to the concept of the fedi and they'll be more willing to migrate to other platforms like Mastodon/Lemmy when they understand the concept better. This is only a good thing for the population, and we won't lose any to the new network as stated before.
So at that point, what is a single downside of this? You can even just instance block them if you still dont like it, so it won't even affect you then.
The size difference between Meta and Mastodon isn't even funny. Mastodon is basically a rounding error.
But even if Meta wouldn't even represent a significant proportion of the fediverse's user base, their presence could influence the development and evolution of ActivityPub and the network. Meta's financial resources and influence could drive changes that a smaller, independent network like the Fediverse might disagree with but have little power to resist.
How would the fedi not have the power to resist? People will just create forks removing unwanted changes. Given the grassroots nature of the fedi, I can bet there's a ton of people willing and qualified to do so. Meta can't do anything to the fedi, we're already independent and fully functional without their involvement so we have zero reliance on them. I don't see how we'd ever have to rely on them.
We don't have to rely on them. They initially support open standards, extend those standards with proprietary features, then use those features to outcompete smaller rivals. You can't deny that this would be in their interest. You can't deny that Meta is known for anti-competitive behavior. Why trust them blindly, just because they do something which looks like they have (or act on) the same values than you?
Out compete with whom? Mastodon is not their rival. Our population is non existent to theirs and is completely irrelevant. They already have a locked down protocol that we can't interact with. I cannot stress this enough: they give zero fucks about the fedi population, and they have nothing to gain from attempting to absorb and extremely small community compared to theirs. Also literally the most resilient community out there.
So I ask again, who are they competing with? They have nothing to gain from us.
They don't need to absorb it. They just have to prevent it from growing as fast. The Fediverse grew orders if magnitude over the last month. If this continues, everything will be the Fediverse. Meta obviously doesn't want that and Threads is a panicked attempt to "nip it in the bud".
If that was the case, then they'd go for Bluesky which will inevitably grow significantly bigger.
Could be. Perhaps the developers of Bluesky realized the dangers of letting them in and showed them the door early. Perhaps it's still to small to take seriously. Who knows.
What we do know though is that the Fediverse grew over leaps and bounds recently and is thus very much on their radar. That's a bad place to be.
Also I don't know if Bluesky protocol is public anywhere? It's possible it could bridge with ActivityPub as well.
Fediverse will even be broken, just as we are now arguing about what will or will not happen. Fedi will not be the same. What will remain are broken pieces of it.