A lot of the anxiety in my TL right now comes from the (justifiable) fear that Meta will embrace, extend, and extinguish the Fediverse.
My question, for them and for you:
What makes you assume it will happen in that direction?
A lot of the anxiety in my TL right now comes from the (justifiable) fear that Meta will embrace, extend, and extinguish the Fediverse.
My question, for them and for you:
What makes you assume it will happen in that direction?
@inthehands I am not worried about Meta devouring Mastodon because Mastodon is small potatoes.
We have 15M users, most of whom aren't active. Yeah, Meta doesn't GAF about us.
The danger, then, is that Meta takes ActivityPub and makes it an actually commercially viable social media platform... Er... Somehow.
Like I said, I'm not worried.
Yes, Meta has more resources.
Recall that Compuserve, Microsoft (via MSN), and AOL all tried to position themselves as •competitors• to the Internet back when they were 900-pound gorillas and the Internet was still a bunch of universities, hobbyists, and garage-based startups.
Yes, I’m also concerned about what how Meta could throw their weight around. But headless entities like the Fediverse have a track record of being hard to kill.
Fears about Meta being a bad community actor (careless with data, flooding the zone, etc) seem more immediately plausible to me than the embrace, extend, extinguish scenario.
We need to be ready to both use and improve the community standards and enforcement tools we have.
Keep in mind, though, that if ActivityPub is doing its job, a new entity federating should not create a new attack surface vs the same entity using existing public data.
From @alexis:
https://alexisart.me/@alexis/110568682849646102
Please, as you worry, just take a moment to hope as well, and embrace the thought experiment of my OP above:
If Meta federates, how can the Fediverse embrace and extend Facebook?
“A door once opened may be stepped through in either direction”
@dingodog19
The recent explosion of high-quality clients seems like a good start.
The next step is tools + integrations that people aren’t willing to give up. Think of how the Reddit folks are reacting to the potential loss of 3rd party clients.
@inthehands I think the web browser was the thing that made "the internet" win out over CompuServe and the proprietary networks.
What will the Netscape Navigator of the Fediverse be? (The developmental analog, not the functional analog, and definitely not actually a browser)
@AlgoCompSynth
Yeah, I do have a FB account, but use it only when necessary for some specific communication.
Some of the hand-wringing about Meta I see here right now doesn’t usefully distinguish between the Fediverse analogs of “having a Facebook account,” “viewing URLs served by Facebook,” and “using a web browser that is capable of connecting to Facebook.”
@inthehands I left Facebook in 2010 after about nine months and I will never go back, nor will I join any social network owned by Meta. They cannot be redeemed.
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