I want to write about the whole #Facebook / #Meta / #Threads whatever-they-call-it but can't right now. Have the short version:
Meta already have the giant monolith sites - two of them - and the Federation is not big enough for them to bother taking over.
And most importantly, that's not where the money is. Any additional money from #Fediverse conquest is scratch marks to them. Not worth the accounting. It doesn't make sense.
The money, however, does exist - but in hosting, on the server side, not front-end shit.
Just like with the Exchange money, for Microsoft.
Microsoft keeps the servers going; the domain owners do the user administration and moderation.
#Meta / #Facebook already have all the money they can get from monolithic sites.
Moderation cost is huge. Massive. Large site hosting also isn't cheap.
So the smart play for the money is to write some NewSite that talks ActivityPub, and a back-end service that makes it trivial to spin off new instances of NewSite...
...for paying customers to run.
Just like Microsoft does with email. Those companies on Exchange email with their own domains are mostly leasing back-end from Microsoft.
For Meta, this outsources all the moderation cost. Host cost goes from expenditure to revenue. It's almost pure profit.
And for us, it means a fleet of small Meta instances, not one giant one.
@moira Facebook has never shown any interest in hosting. But the do do paid whatsapp sites and such, so maybe they’d support company instances.
I suspect they are just hedging their bet. Fediverse compatibility gets them more publicity. They know that companies may 2”want their own servers they control, this way they get access to that content without having to persuade people to trust them with hosting.
But what they do get is the ability to slap ads on everything that enters their space from the Fediverse. And ads is something they understand.
@nazgul Microsoft hadn't shown any interest in hosting either until that's where all the money was. Then all at once they were very interested.
I'm not saying I know this is it for sure, but... there's money in what I describe. Maybe lots. If it works out like email, it's Billions with capital B, just sitting there.
And sure, they can "slap ads on everything that enters their space from the Fediverse," but once again: that's scratch marks for them. They have all the content they could ever want already. They don't need our more content, because our more content won't actually make them more money.
Hell, the the dev and maintenance costs involved would most likely make it a net loss.
@moira It definitely could go that way. I mean, Amazon didn’t anticipate that, and now it’s a huge chunk of their profits.
But I think Meta is concerned about people to provide content. They dominate a lot of markets, but the market that earns the most is the U.S., and in that market Facebook is a boomer product, and Instagram is desperately trying to compete with TikTok. Their demographics don’t look good in the long run.
That said, I’m not sure a Twitter clone is going to do any better.
@nazgul Our content is extremely not tictok-like, and sure, we're mostly not boomers, but we are mostly gen X. We are not the content they are looking for.
And even if we were, again: scratch marks. They have on the order of two billion accounts. We have a bit over 10 million, half of a percent of that, and our actives are 1.1-1.2 million, less than a 10th of a percent.
They have, even with their demographic curves, endlessly more more of the kind of content they want more of already than we have of all content in totality.Particularly including Instagram, which I do. It's all Meta.
That's what I mean by scratch marks. And I don't think "federation" is going to be the magic word for the Zoomers.
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