I don't think Meta is perfect and they get a lot of flak, but having the development support of employees working at Meta behind building the fediverse might benefit us all
I don't think I'm alone in being more than a little skeptical of this. I'm here because the fediverse is an alternative to centralized corporate social media that still retains many of the benefits of the centralized platforms (i.e., i don't have to log on to 50 different forums). Meta is the polar opposite of the principles that make the fediverse attractive
"Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" yet again, I'm guessing? Defederate them. Nothing good comes out of Big Tech occupying FOSS technologies to turn a profit.
@Andreas There is no evidence that is a real thing. Either the technology wasn't profitable for the big tech company, like XMPP, or big tech uses it in everything, like RSS, but normies just don't like to use it. If Meta join and then close itself into a silo it's the fediverse's fault.
Why would it be the fediverse's fault to not welcome Meta? They're the company behind the most privacy-invasive social media that currently exists. They would most certainly abuse federation to mine user data, push ads and fill the federated network with spambots like email networks. Then introduce a spam filter for their platform to force everyone else to use the Meta platform or remain on the bot-infested fediverse. Just nip it in the bud and reject corporate takeover attempts on the fediverse.
@Andreas The answer is that if it's worth it for Meta to pull out it means the fediverse isn't successfull at the things it needs to be successfull at. Email the closest equivalent which is a success, and it will never make sense for a email provider to pull out, which is what the fediverse needs to achieve.
You and I have different definitions of success for the fediverse. To me, a successful fediverse (I'm specifically referring to federated social media, not communication in general) is one with a healthy number of human users providing high-quality contributions. It doesn't have to kill and replace centralized social media or become extremely profitable. Leave corporate social media around so the spambots and people who prefer to be force-fed advertising and rage bait can stay there.
A decentralized communication protocol like Nostr would definitely be nice to see for instant messaging, but that's not social media.
Noble goal, but "most people" don't want to be empowered. If they're led somewhere by Meta and stay with Meta, they're still under Meta's control. The average Gmail user is not empowered and free from Google just because email is a decentralized protocol.
I'm really wondering if this really is the thing that gets 'everyone' into the fediverse, and how long it might take before it disconnects as it doesn't need the fediverse to thrive.
With a big player like Meta in the game, I wouldn't be surprised if they do something similar to other large companies that adopt standards like these - they attempt to gain as much influence as possible with how the standards are written, like Google has done with web standards.
I don't see any possibility of meta investing millions or billions of dollars into a product in which they don't dictate how it works, they will either have their own fork or a completely separate project IMHO.
@Kaldo We already have flipboard, Mozilla and others investing heavily. So I don't think it's out of the question. But we do not really know of profitable the fediverse is for investment yet though. We see profitable apps, but we haven't seen profitable platforms. Most of it is umbrella platforms that utillize community funding and engagement to keep a larger userbase. But it's not a very long-winded approach.
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