Meta won't federate anyone. They don't want to host illegal content on their servers, that would be an absolute PR disaster for them. And this is what will happen if they federate with a random instance. Even clean instances will want to play tricks on Meta if federated.
They are the prototype of the mono instance federation. They want control. They want to attract the people leaving Twitter. I don't think they care about us, what they want to avoid is that our instances become too big and start to offer an alternative.
@wrath Defederate with any instance Meta has infected - including any instance at Mastodon who thinks this is a good idea. I left FB years ago because of this and their boosting of the alt-right
Hopefully no credible Fediverse platform actually federates with their trojan horse. If we let Zuck, or anyone like him, become a major player in the ActivityPub world, pretty soon we're going to end up right back where we started.
Genuinely curious as I'm new to all of this, why would it matter? Isn't that the whole point of the fediverse? If their spyware app interfacing with it is what gets the casual users into it who already have Meta's spyware installed, you can still use the fediverse from whatever service you prefer, right?
Honestly I think a lot of it is that the Fediverse (especially Mastodon) wants to remain a small community relatively isolated from regular social networks, and a very big instance would ruin that. It’s very similar to Usenet when AOL customers got access to it (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September).
Some people are worried about Meta having their data, but anything you post publicly in the Fediverse is, by definition, public. A whole heap of servers have your data, and even today some of the federated servers could be operated by large companies. How would you know? My Lemmy server is federating with over a thousand others… I don’t know who runs all of those or what they’re doing with the data…
I’m still trying to wrap my head around Fediverse concepts as well but the thing that stands out for me is that there is a history of private companies effectively killing open source projects.
For us, the vulnerability is ActivityPub. If Meta begins “contributing” to a foundational Fediverse technology, they have the resources to extend the protocol in a way that benefits Meta only, at a pace that only a company with the resources of Meta can.
