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.
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.
Why does the rest of the fediverse die in this hypothetical scenario? Presumably other instances are still alive and offering an alternative that excludes whatever shit Facebook’s instance would have.
Alright, I’ll try to explain it in another way:
Facebook currently has nearly 3 billion active users. They are huge, they can make ads on Facebook to let people join their Fediverse Meta instances. Or even easier: People can use their already existing Facebook account on the Meta instances. Super easy to switch.
Now you got absolutely massive Meta instances, millions of users. Or even a billion. It pops off, all the content is there, all the users are there.
The entire rest of the fediverse might have a million users or something, it’s tiny in comparison. Why sign up to some random instance when you can just join a Meta instance? As a Meta user you might join a very small and niche community on a Lemmy instance, but that’s going to be super rare (and the same community on a Meta instance would have more users and content).
The second Meta turns off federation and locks the fediverse out, you’ll have 99.9% of users and content on Meta servers. And very unhappy fediverse users on smaller instances who just got cut off from all the content. But what are they gonna do? Write a letter to Meta? Or give up and join a Meta instance to get their content back?
Meta joining the fediverse is not going to be an equal partnership. I have no clue why they are doing this in the first place, besides maybe siphoning off current content for a head-start to build it up, before they got enough users in to defederate.
For the same reasons that smaller instances would defederate from Meta. And the same reasons people don’t use FB or Meta now. They suck and they’re not really community-driven. Having the most content isn’t the be-all and end-all. Beyond a certain critical mass, things get too noisy and quality drops.
The migration from Reddit to Lemmy is essentially the same scenario. Lemmy at least makes it possible for splintering to happen without losing your home instance.
The way you described it, it’s not like the non-FB fediverse was great and then died. It’s more like the non-FB fediverse was small (compared to FB) and stayed small as FB converted it’s already-large userbase.
But I agree that any “too big to fail” fediverse instance is a bad thing, because you can lose massive communities this way. I think there should probably be some rules within particular federations that limit the size of instances.
As far as losing content, I am less concerned because there ought to be a way to clone content from a defederated instance as a sort of “restore from backup”. It’s probably not an existing feature but it sounds possible.
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