this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2023
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Huh. I was just saying up here that I don't think anybody genuinely believes the fediverse is a Meta competitor, but... guess I was wrong.
Mastodon does not have the upper hand by any metric. Threads alone has an order of magnitude more active users than the entire fediverse and Meta has multiple platforms with billions of users (and have signaled that they want Threads to reach that size).
You can absolutely argue that ActivityPub is a tech trendsetter and has an edge over BlueSky in that it's already up and running. You can't seriously argue that Mastodon or the fediverse are a threat, a competitor or have an advantage over Threads or Meta. One of the biggest hints that Meta isn't going for "EEE" here is that it's probably not worth the effort.
Not a competitor, that's the corps view on things (the fediverse taking a piece of it's cake, us not looking at ads and not playing stupid games on their platforms).
It still shows up in metrics and market share (not on every chart/pie, but still). What I meant was that it can be taken as a serious player by some. I don't think it really is, but some people do.
And by having the upper hand, I meant as in being more advanced and in it's adolescent stage, not in it's infancy (which wasn't the case with XMPP... maybe it wasn't in it's infancy, but it barely reached puberty). My point was that people on Mastodon, devs and admins, know exactly what they like and you can't really push them around or try and lour them into some scheme, like flushing down millions into Mastodon development (which will put them in their pocket). We've seen this tactic with other companies (Mozilla as the most prominent example) and we know exactly where it leads. This wasn't the case back then, people generally trusted IT companies, they really thought most of them cared about the users. Sure, make a few bucks here and there, but in general, just take care of the users and business as a second thing. Of course, we learned later on that that was never the plan, at all, but it was too late by then.
They do the integration for a reason... what that reason might be, I have no idea... might be malicious, might not be. In any case, even if they truly have the best intents for their users (which I seriously doubt) and the Fediverse (which I also seriously doubt), that doesn't mean that the product of those good willed intentions can't be taken to another level, i.e. used to do bad things. Remember, the dynamite wasn't invented to be used in bombs.
I swear, I'm so tired of naive takes about "good" and "bad" corporations.
Corporations are corporations. They are groups of people legally mandated to make money for their shareholders. They're not individuals.
So yeah, I'm fairly confident that them taking steps towards joining ActivityPub is some mix of high ranking people thnking interoperability is cool, some other high ranking people thinking that may smooth over what seems like an immediate future full of legal challenges, particularly in Europe and some other people thinking that as long as all the newcomers to the Twitter corpse party are interoperable they can flex their superior resources and development.
Because that's how groups of people behave.
But I'm also very confident that nobody looked at the rounding error that is the fediverse userbase, disproportionally made up of FOSS true believers and fringe infosec nerds and went "we need to plot their demise". That's not a thing that groups of people concerned with building userbases in the billions talk about.
There are no good corporations... well, not any more. Some of them actually used to care about making good products. Now, no, none of them care about that.
Exactly.
Not saying that that is the true nature of the plan, but that there are numerous aspects (as you noted) by which this can be seen as a good thing by Meta (as in, it gives a peek into their playground) to do... whatever... good or bad, doesn't matter.