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 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, which does seem unlikely, but we shall see.
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.