I saw a while back that facebook is opening a twitter competitor which will use the ActivityPub protocol, and thus will be able to federate with other fediverse instances, I also saw they invited some fediverse instance admins for an “off the records” meeting in their HQ.
Question is, what is the general stance on this? Because I despise facebook with every fiber of my being, and would very much like to NOT have facebook lurk around these parts, as I understand there is an option to de-federate them like what happened with the exploading heads instance.
I’d assume any actions by Facebook are hostile and are attempts to Embrace, extend, and extinguish
The strategy’s three phases are:
- Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
- Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
- Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
It’s just more embrace, extend, extinguish crap. Meta absolutely shouldn’t be trusted, especially with their track record so far. Most (though not all) instances I know are defederating.
I think federating with an instance that would actually want federation to die (have a monopoly) is a very bad idea. Meta would use it’s leverage to actively undermine and harm the Fediverse, because it’s not in their interest to distribute the userbase to multiple servers they don’t own. They only need it to bootstrap their own service.
Ever heard the phrase “democracy without democrats”? That would be Meta in the Fediverse.
Facebook/Meta and the like have proven to be untrustworthy. If they were a person, would you let them federate with your friend group? I wouldn’t. I hope they’re not invited to the party because the things that brought me here are the things that drove me away from there.
They are welcome to use the is core software. But they should be defederated immediately. We have seen this before. It’s never different.
I hope any fediverse instance I use defederates with them.
they should stay out.
usually if corporations try to get on things like this, they try to convert users to their platform then seriously limit or degrade the experience when interacting with anything outside of their stuff.so in the end, everyone is trapped in their ecosystem.
I’d say wait and see how it plays out. I’m all for making the fediverse more accessible to the general public, as long as Facebook/Meta doesn’t try anything funny, which does seem unlikely, but we shall see.
There’s no way this ends well. I can tell you exactly what would happen:
Meta creates a new fediverse app with their branding. Facebook users (and the general public) will start to see this as the fediverse. Like the official app/server/whatever. If it takes off millions of users will join on Meta instances and only hang out there (with some slight content influx at the start from other instances).
The moment they have enough content on Meta servers they’ll defederate from everyone. The Meta users probably won’t even notice, they are on massive Meta instances and 90%+ of the content is there.
Gratulations, you got Facebook 2.0, the rest of the fediverse dies.
