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 heard Facebook was going to make something “built on Mastodon,” but I didn’t think federation was on the table too. I would think a company wouldn’t want open federation, that sounds like a content moderation nightmare.
Likewise, if I ran a Mastodon server, I’d block them immediately. I don’t use Facebook for a reason, and anyone who would just blindly let Facebook scoop up their community data is part of the problem.
I posted this on Mastodon, but I completely disagree with the idea of defederating from Meta instances on principal for the same reason I don’t want my Fastmail account to stop interacting with Gmail accounts just because I feel Google is too corporate. That defeats the entire purpose of open standards and federated content. I should be able to choose to personally block content from Meta instances if I want to, but it’s to the detriment of the community to fracture the Fediverse just because it’s starting to grow large enough to attract attention from one of the big tech companies.
The reality is, a federated Meta service would at least initially grow the idea of federated social media as a whole, and likely drive traffic to Kbin/Lemmy/Mastodon from people who want to get off of the Meta platforms, but don’t want to cut contact with their friends/coworkers/enemies entirely. While I probably wouldn’t make an account, I’d be interested in at least being able to follow a few of my friends who I actually have interest in seeing updates from via my Masto/Kbin accounts.
And I’m aware of the embrace/extend/extinguish paradigm, but premature defederation isn’t the answer there either.
I’m an advocate for federated content for convenience, not on principal alone.
I think comparing it with E-Mail is a bit naive. It a different history. Accepting Meta basically means making it the main instance of the fediverse. The main content and users will be over there. There will be policies what is allowed and not allowed on the main instance and who can federate with it. With new additions of features and policies the federation of will slowly become meaningless. In the end it will be a similar situation like with Reddit. Where Meta is Reddit in this scenario and the other instances are the third party clients. Yes they will still be able to communicate with each other. But in the grand scheme of things the rest of the network will be irrelevant.
There already is a tendency to flock to the largest instances. Meta can provide a larger instance than all current instances combined and will have better UX.
This is a social / business problem. Not a technical one about open protocols. Meta has shown in the past that they might have good developers and open source a ton of stuff. But their business side of things is borderline evil.