Fediverse

Here’s a pretty thorough explanation of why this Meta app is dangerous for the Fediverse.

https://fediversereport.com/meta-plans-on-joining-the-fediverse-the-responses/

I’m still trying to wrap my head around Fediverse concepts as well but the thing that stands out for me is that there is a history of private companies effectively killing open source projects.

For us, the vulnerability is ActivityPub. If Meta begins “contributing” to a foundational Fediverse technology, they have the resources to extend the protocol in a way that benefits Meta only, at a pace that only a company with the resources of Meta can.

Because meta wants to: 1) embrace fedi and open it up to their users, 2) extend all possibilities in fedi forcing more users onto their instance and apps, 3) once they become the defacto instance and interface they will extinguish fedi.

Honestly I think a lot of it is that the Fediverse (especially Mastodon) wants to remain a small community relatively isolated from regular social networks, and a very big instance would ruin that. It's very similar to Usenet when AOL customers got access to it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).

Some people are worried about Meta having their data, but anything you post publicly in the Fediverse is, by definition, public. A whole heap of servers have your data, and even today some of the federated servers could be operated by large companies. How would you know? My Lemmy server is federating with over a thousand others... I don't know who runs all of those or what they're doing with the data...

The TL;DR is "so it doesn't become XMPP" - if a big player from the corporate internet world achieves significant sway over the Fediverse, that gives them a position of power to steer the platform itself, eventually letting them undermine the whole "open-source" and "decentralised" part of it entirely before taking their chunk of the federation private, effectively kneecapping the remaining communities outside the walled garden.

If you've ever heard "the three Es" - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, best known from the Microsoft antitrust days - that's what we're worried about happening here.

It's more or less the same problem as XMPP (end-to-end encrypted, federated chat protocol) had with Google Talk.

All users went to Google and then Google broke interoperability with federated servers, leaving them dead/unable to communicate with the majority of users.

Later Google killed the project as they always do. XMPP is still around, but the userbase is very small.

Here's a post worth reading:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

The "fediverse" has been gaining traction recently, the fear is that Meta comes in with 1.2bn users, gets everyone on their service and the breaks federation, leaving the rest of the fediverse a drying carcass as they "move on".

Personally, I don't really care about the "popularity contest" - I'm not here because the community is large, I'm here because it isn't. Signal > Noise. So I'm all for defederation.

Meta has zero trust after all they've done.