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?
it’s an interesting development that will have a direct impact on lemmy since mastodon and lemmy users can interact with each other.
time will tell how closely they follow microsoft’s old “embrace, extend, extinguish” game plan for combatting open standards. who knows? maybe they will be good faith actors in this new space, or won’t be able to gain enough user share to truly do nasty stuff.
Regardless of what people think of them, Facebook has a history of open sourcing their own code and tools, unlike early day Microsoft. They’re very different companies and I think it’s silly to arbitrarily apply the same playbook across entities, especially when that playbook is over 20 years old at this point.
But most importantly, that’s just not how the fediverse works. What’s the worst case scenario here? They pay developers to enhance open source code and instances selectively update? They know the second they push an update people don’t like they’ll be defederated, and maybe they’re fine with that, but the fediverse as it exists now is not going anywhere. It’s open source and it isn’t the 90s anymore, I’m sure someone is going to fork it as soon as Meta releases a single line of code.