Since news leaked out 2 days ago that Facebook has approached Mastodon developers and admins - requiring non-disclosure agreements first - the whole microverse (i.e. mastodon / pleroma etc, the micro-blogging part of fedi) has been talking about nothing but that and Facebook’s imminent entry into the fediverse with an as yet not clearly defined entity called Barcelona or p92. This woud be very roughly comparable to Reddit saying they are going to federate with lemmy.
Yet here on lemmy I could only find a relatively small discussion.
https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/62958
Did the lemmyverse not know or just not care that much?
They’re in this to eat Twitter’s lunch, not “ruin the Fediverse” with EEE like people seem to think. Twitter is dying and people want an alternative, but Mastodon doesn’t have critical mass yet. I have a buddy who hates Twitter, wants to be on Mastodon, but most of the accounts he follows aren’t there, so he is waiting and “looking for an alternative.” If Facebook gets in the game, they think it could be enough to fully pull users from Twitter (I think they’re wrong and think Twitter’s new CEO is going to right the ship, but I digress). Importantly to them this gets more people using Facebook (I highly doubt it will be its own website), AND importantly for the Fediverse it gets more people on Mastodon if they play nice together and they eventually figure out they can get all the same content they want without being on Facebook. Early AOL wasn’t a hindrance to the world wide web, it was a (very literal) gateway to it for a lot of people.