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?
I’ve heard something about it, but I guess Lemmies have been too busy with Reddit and just building up Lemmy communities, so this flew under the radar.
And honestly yea, why should we care? If they wanna make an instance, nobody is stopping them, but I hope nobody will want to federate with them. We’ve had enough of corporate socials lately.
The shocking news this week was that a couple of admins of large Mastodon instances were talking with Meta (under NDA’s!), so it seems your hope (and mine) will be in vain.
It’s really going to be up to the users to push back should the admins get a payout to do something not in the communities interest.
Everyone is going to have to remain nimble and not rely on finding a permanent server until corporations get the message that this is a space that cannot be monetized in a capitalist way.
There is a risk that they start going the path of Microsoft’s “Embrace, extend, extinguish”. Although they probably wouldn’t call an isolated instance “Lemmy”, they could start as being federated. It might not even be obvious that it’s run by Facebook.
But once they have a stranglehold on users/communities, they can pitch themselves as the “most complete” portal to Lemmy. Even if they completely defederate, they would have the instance people want to be on
People are wayyyyy underestimating what a market cap the size of meta can buy you. Mainly, it can buy any feasible competitor or threat to your perpetual domination. Then you simply eat them.
It’s not that much different than how meta et al were trying to get tiktok banned on the guise of “security” when really they just didn’t want to have to compete with them. The arguments will look a little different, but the strategy is the same