cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/9799372
What’s Meta up to?
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Embrace ActivityPub, , Mastodon, and the fediverse
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Extend ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse with a very-usable app that provides additional functionality (initially the ability to follow everybody you’re following on Instagram, and to communicate with all Threads users) that isn’t available to the rest of the fediverse – as well over time providing additional services and introducing incompatibilities and non-standard improvements to the protocol
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Exploit ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse by utilizing them for profit – and also using them selfishly for Meta’s own ends
Since the fediverse is so much smaller than Threads, the most obvious ways of exploiting it – such as stealing market share by getting people currently in the fediverse to move to Threads – aren’t going to work. But exploitation is one of Meta’s core competences, and once you start to look at it with that lens, it’s easy to see some of the ways even their initial announcement and tiny first steps are exploiting the fediverse: making Threads feel like a more compelling platform, and reshaping regulation. Longer term, it’s a great opportunity for Meta to explore – and maybe invest in – shifting their business model to decentralized surveillance capitalism.
Well, it makes me sad that we would have to, but that doesn’t make me agree less that it would be necessary to keep a real alternative in existence.
Every instance that allows Meta should not be considered part of the Fediverse anymore, but is now Metaverse. Mastodon/Pleroma/Lemmy/… will then just become the running software, but not by default ‘Fediverse’ anymore, that choice will become the admin’s: Fedi or Meta.
In a perfect world we can still keep the big parties out for those that choose to, though at first it will be hard, not only to keep up with instances leaking both ways, but also hard to let go of the unrelated users that had no choice in the matter and are now presented with: change server or follow the server’s choice, and the second choice will be the least trouble for most. In other words: many followers will be lost and many currently followed won’t be reachable anymore.