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?
On the one hand, embrace-extend-extinguish is a classic playbook for big evil companies.
- Facebook runs a version of mastodon or lemmy or whatever that is actually good
- People get on board because it’s usable and ostensibly open
- Facebook invents features that, sadly, are not possible with ActivityPub (actual private messages come to mind)
On the other hand, it remains to be seen if anyone takes Meta up on a new offering. I’d have complete faith in the future of the open Internet if it was Google trying this.
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.
Given the “anyone can join in” nature of the fediverse, something like this was inevitable. I expected it to be at least be another couple of years, though.
There is potential good for this- a lot more developer resources going into this technology. And being open source software, there’s a lot of ways we can potentially mitigate any damage if we have to. But… there’s definitely a lot of ways this can go poorly as well.
I haven’t really heard that much about this. But I am very skeptical of any claims that Facebook is actually going to fedderate in good faith.
Obviously, it’ll be up to the administrators of the different instances whether to federate or not. So we’ll see
I also wonder how big the overlap is between people who would use a federated platform and those who would willingly use anything made by Facebook.
With that said, I’ll never say never, but I find the likelihood of this taking off to be slim to none
I also wonder how big the overlap is between people who would use a federated platform and those who would willingly use anything made by Facebook.
It doesn’t have to overlap if they bake it into their existing website. A huge portion of humanity has a Facebook account, even if they don’t use it. They’re baking in as much as they can with Marketplace taking over Craigslist’s former space, trying to capture VR with your Facebook account, and now they want to take over Twitter’s space. And I’m not saying the backend work wouldn’t be huge, but their whole “posting stuff to people who follow you” schtick fits perfectly with the Fediverse. There’s nothing stopping them from just federating everything.
Fair, however I’m still VERY skeptical of them federating in good faith
A reasonable stance, but as has been covered elsewhere in the thread, Facebook has a pretty good track record with open source software so far. They don’t really EEE like Microsoft, they buy other private sector companies to quash torture competitors. Kind of a different evil
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.
