I’ve been hearing that Meta (Facebook) intends to join the fediverse. I have some very big concerns about that, as do apparently many others. There exists a group of instances called the fedipact which will not be federating with Meta, and I was wondering if this instance would be joining. So there is no ambiguity with this post: I have no desire to participate in any instance that is federated with Facebook, and will kindly pass on another Eternal September. Hope that doesn’t come off as aggressive, that’s just where I’m at.
So the threat is Meta offering a better service that draws a user base? Is that flexibility not the entire thesis of fediverse platforms?
Further, if Meta is able to provide a service that users see as so fundamentally better, then they should get a large portion of the population. That’s the nature of a competitive market.
That is the “embrace” part of embrace, extend, extinguish. It is great at first, but once they have that base all in one place it will be monetized and there will be none of the smaller sites left.
But the nature of the federated platforms is that they will always be able to have new instance created that can still access the content of the largest, without explicitly needing that community to move over.