What this whole Meta-attempting-to-federate thing has really illuminated for me is how at odds capitalism and democracy really are.
This really looks like the Instagram play, at least to me: connect with a competitor, synchronize the services, and then absorb them. With IG, they were able to do this because market forces favor whoever has the biggest bank account.
Will that happen with Fedi? Idk, maybe. Too soon to tell. It depends on how many decide to federate with them, although even one opens the door to more access than Meta was already getting just because both services are on the Internet. But that's the key difference-- the Fedi won't go over all at once, not as long as there are servers that don't federate with Meta. This is the advantage of decentralization.
@Em@ravensong92 so what we've seen previously is known as Co-opt, consolidate, kill; the most well-known example would be Google adopting xmpp for their Google Talk client. What they did is they moved in, made Google Talk compatible with, xmpp, got a lot of people interested in the protocol and on the Google Talk platform, then they closed sourced their app removed the support for xmpp and effectively took the legs off of the xmpp protocol community to which it's still struggling to regain usage numbers today.
@Em@ravensong92 only if we let them. Actively and loudly opposing them and their ilk loudly at every turn will help. Forming networks of trust between servers as individual admin and users, rather then giant servers and consolidated groups make it impossible for them to do their usual "we'll just buy the company and gut it for data" approach but it means we'll need to be checking in on each other, like friends do 👍
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