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?
probably an unpopular opinion but facebook does also have a sort of track record of contributing to open source projects in ways that benefit everyone. facebook wanted to use subversion (or some other non-git source control) and contributed significantly so that it would work great for huge repositories like theirs. and facebook use memcached for their caches and contribute heavily so that they can use it more efficiently.
i’m also skeptical about end motivations, but in terms of being able to lend engineering effort to open source projects and helping to create a better product for all, it’s not such a bad idea.
At least it’s not a bad idea until they leverage those tools they helped develop to takeover or dissolve services. I think it’s about time we start learning our lesson with these big corps rather than trying to give them a chance.
I hear you. I could imagine that the biggest “threat” is that facebook comes out with some incredible contributions and features, but it requires modifying activitypub or in some way restricts instances that want those tools from collaborating with the rest of the fediverse. Causing a fediverse split between those who want meta’s features, and are willing to fall under meta’s control, and those who would rather not have them could be bad.
They’re behind React which has become pretty ubiquitous in the frontend dev space too.
creating react isnt a positive impact on the world lets be honest
i would say it was quite negative even
Care to elaborate?
Google has a similar reputation and yet XMPPs half rotten corpse is still floating down the river
oh yeah, “killed by google” is definitely a thing. a real big thing.
Google has a reputation of creating Google versions of popular open source projects. Then, they abandon it when some corporate hack decides they’re bored with it. I’m amazed that Angular has lasted so long, but it does have some deep Googlification. Just recently, they’ve been moving off of the well supported bundler, webpack (which they didn’t give you any access to the configuration of), and onto their own custom made bundler just for Angular. It’ll probably result in faster, better builds but it’s unlikely to be useful for anything but Angular.
So while it’s nice that Google has made their internal tooling available, it’s still at the mercy of Google getting bored and moving on. I like the cohesiveness of it compared to React because it does come fully loaded, no configuration needed, but it’s also not as bullet proof from corporate meddling as React is. Fortunately, coin counters don’t seem to pay attention to build tools, otherwise I’m sure there’d be some PRO version for a major payment.
*sigh* What could have been. Pour one out for XMPP.
For the source control system you’re thinking of Mercurial, and yep indeed that’s accurate.
They also notoriously open-sourced Hack and HHVM, their monolith’s language compiler and runtime. It’s a pretty narrow use case (having a PHP monolith and wanting it to scale), but they didn’t have to do it.
Anyway yeah, they indeed have pretty good genuine history with their open source efforts.
mercurial - that’s the one! :P
They’re in this to eat Twitter’s lunch, not “ruin the Fediverse” with EEE like people seem to think. Twitter is dying and people want an alternative, but Mastodon doesn’t have critical mass yet. I have a buddy who hates Twitter, wants to be on Mastodon, but most of the accounts he follows aren’t there, so he is waiting and “looking for an alternative.” If Facebook gets in the game, they think it could be enough to fully pull users from Twitter (I think they’re wrong and think Twitter’s new CEO is going to right the ship, but I digress). Importantly to them this gets more people using Facebook (I highly doubt it will be its own website), AND importantly for the Fediverse it gets more people on Mastodon if they play nice together and they eventually figure out they can get all the same content they want without being on Facebook. Early AOL wasn’t a hindrance to the world wide web, it was a (very literal) gateway to it for a lot of people.