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?
Btw for those curious, Meta/FB approaching Mastodon admins is related to their in-development Project92/Threads possible Twitter-successor/competitor.
As it says at the start of the article, the intent is integrate ActivityPub in it in some way. Concerns are being raised for a variety of understandable possibilities some others have mentioned here, or sort of alluded to, such as the corporate practice of Embracing, Extending, and Extinguishing. An idea being that Facebook may only be adopting ActivityPub to in some way screw everyone else using it over.
There’s also the possibilities of questionable FB moderation practices permitting a flooding of linked instances with unmoderated FB garbage, scraping data (but since most of the fediverse stuff is public they…Don’t really need their own public app to do that), and so on.
Upvoted for mentioning EEE. Meta has been really active in facilitating progress in the opensource community lately with their work on LLAMA, so I’m not surprised to hear they are involved elsewhere.
Like much of big tech, they’ve been open sourcing software for years and EEE is a Microsoft playbook that was mainly used to target competitors, not open source software, from before Facebook even existed. People are parroting it because it’s a nice sounding alliteration, but it’s a false equivalence that does not apply because we can fork lemmy at any time.
Google successfully EEE the internet. They embraced chromium, extended such that they were the main (only) force that determines internet standads, now they extinguish all competition or obstacles in the ad space by setting the rules. This was done through free open source software.
Would love to see Mozilla come up with a few new standards
“Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” might be difficult to make work with Free Software because it can be forked, but that doesn’t categorically exclude it from being a strategy companies can try. It’s still relevant to warn the community about.
Oh it’s past warning at this point, it’s irrational paranoia led by people who haven’t the slightest idea how any of this works. Users are up in arms because Mastadon admins had a meeting, Lemmy users are demanding their instances sign petitions to defederate Meta instances immediately, all citing an outdated business strategy from the 90s that doesn’t even apply to this situation. This isn’t just “free software”, it’s open source, nobody can take this away from you, and I’m pretty sure Meta has other things in mind other than absorbing the existing 1M fediverse users into their 4B userbase.
My point is, everyone needs to calm down, watching and waiting is absolutely the correct move here. There is no operating in the shadows when contributing to open source software, so let them contribute. Honestly they probably just want to hit market faster and it’s easier to build on top of open source software than to build it all from scratch.