That’s it. It’s just the fastest springboard this garbage company had to get yet another social media platform out the door when they sensed blood in the water.
Edit: This is a response to people who think FB users will somehow discover the fediverse and be converted by this action. They won’t.
Or that FB has noble goals in choosing AP or will somehow be forced to be better. They won’t.
It’s just good software.
Thank you for saying this. The panic I’ve been seeing over this decision is unreal.
Meta are not engaged in some grand scheme to destroy the fediverse. Meta do not give two shits about the existence of the fediverse.
Meta wants to destroy Twitter. That’s their only goal. Their only competition. They don’t have a plan for killing the fediverse because they don’t think it will ever be big enough to matter. And nothing about engaging with the fediverse gives them any leverage to do harm to it. There are so many whacked out theories about how this is some kind of attack but none of them even make any sense. “They’ll start cutting off smaller instances.” OK. So those smaller instances won’t be connected to threads. Right now I’m pretty sure no instances are connected to threads. Last week they certainly weren’t. And those smaller instances were doing just fine. We’re not talking about taking away oxygen. It’s just refusing something that nobody wants anyway.
You can’t prove any of your assertions. It’s all supposition. Meanwhile, history has many examples of corporations doing exactly what people are fearing. Like what Google did to XMPP, and Microsoft did to Kerberos. It’s wise to be wary.
There’s even a Wikipedia article on the tactic Microsoft uses: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
You’re taking a realistic possibility and poo-pooing it when you don’t know anything about the history of corporations destroying open source standards.
It’s precisely because I do understand the history that I’m “poo-pooing” the mass hysteria that’s going around here.
Everyone keeps citing examples like email and XMPP without actually stopping to think about whether they are actually comparable to what’s happening with Meta and the fediverse. Because they’re really not
You’re more than welcome to explain to me how Facebook’s dastardly plan to destroy Mastodon actually works, but I sincerely hope it’s more than just “Oh, like what happened with XMPP,” because it’s not. These are different situations, plain and simple.
You make fair points but it’s a bit much to call this reaction mass hysteria. I think people are just trying to figure out where we all stand if/when Meta does start interfering with the fediverse.
We don’t need to have a full understanding of how their dastardly plan works in order to be apprehensive about the possibility.
I agree with you that the threat seems limited for now, but its also wise to be extremely wary and cautious when dealing with an entity such as Meta.