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.
Same thing happened with google and xmpp as another user linked to, this is why i dont want facebook involvment, we cannot allow them to interact with lemmy or mastodon, their scummy tactics will force instaces to interact with them, and then meta will try to shut them down
There was a post on lemmy some time ago about a story how Google basically killed XMPP with their Google Talk service.
So this should be kept in mind. If at some point Facebook tends to dictate how the fediverse has to work, then better let them do their own thing.
Edit: Found it https://lemmy.world/post/467454
I think this article has some interesting points, but if we are honest here, what killed XMPP was mobile phones with “unlimited texting” plans. And then Facebook generally became the preferred method for “deeper” online interaction soon after. I remember using Trillian as an XMPP client but by that time the writing was already on the wall. Pure Chat/messenger services just never really recovered in general.
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 think federating with an instance that actually wants federation to die (have a monopoly) is a very bad idea. Meta would use its leverage to actively undermine and harm the Fediverse, because it’s not in their interest to split the userbase between multiple servers they don’t own. Imo they only want to use it to bootstrap their own service, after that they’ll do anything to control as much of the users and content as possible. That’s the complete opposite of what the Fediverse is supposed to be!
Ever heard of the phrase “democracy without democrats”? That would be Meta in the Fediverse.
That is also why I do not want meta on any fediverse instance, I hope that as a user I will be able to block meta’s instance, and wont have to rely on my instance (lemmy.world) to do it
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.
Meta not trying something funny is extremley unlikely, they live to monotize everything they touch, which I bet will include the fediverse
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
It’s a well known development strategy at this point, and anything even close to embrace is petrifying
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.
Why sign up to some random instance when you can just join a Meta instance?
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.
But what are they gonna do? Write a letter to Meta? Or give up and join a Meta instance to get their content back?
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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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.
Maybe I am missing something but it seems that they are going to use ActivityPub to create a Twitter competitor (akin to Mastodon) and not necessarily a lemmy instance.
I am new to the fediverse so maybe I am missing something.
Source: https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/11/meta_twitter_rival/
You can interact with mastodon from lemmy, it depends on the instance if im not mistaken
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.
If they keep allowing fascist bullshit or fill it with ads because it simply brings them money, they will be defederated and that’s it
I wonder how this would affect the server load seeing as they might bring in a lot more traffic. However on the other hand, they might popularize fediverse and open up lemmy for more people
But all the people would join Meta instances, not other fediverse servers. And in such massive amounts compared to the rest of fediverse that Meta servers will be “The Fediverse”. At some point Meta can just defederate from everyone, take away 90%+ of users (and content) and keep their new Facebook 2.0 walled garden.
I really don’t see any upsides here, in the end it will ruin 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.
Well if they wanna lurk around they can, that’s just how federation works. The good thing is that they don’t control anything other than their own instances in that case which makes it harder for them to spy on you. You and other instances can also just block their instances. Not sure Metas business Model is functional on a platform like this.
