What’s Meta up to?
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Embrace ActivityPub, , Mastodon, and the fediverse
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Extend ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse with a very-usable app that provides additional functionality (initially the ability to follow everybody you’re following on Instagram, and to communicate with all Threads users) that isn’t available to the rest of the fediverse – as well over time providing additional services and introducing incompatibilities and non-standard improvements to the protocol
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Exploit ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse by utilizing them for profit – and also using them selfishly for Meta’s own ends
Since the fediverse is so much smaller than Threads, the most obvious ways of exploiting it – such as stealing market share by getting people currently in the fediverse to move to Threads – aren’t going to work. But exploitation is one of Meta’s core competences, and once you start to look at it with that lens, it’s easy to see some of the ways even their initial announcement and tiny first steps are exploiting the fediverse: making Threads feel like a more compelling platform, and reshaping regulation. Longer term, it’s a great opportunity for Meta to explore – and maybe invest in – shifting their business model to decentralized surveillance capitalism.
given how prescient FB has been on buying companies that grew to become staples, like WhatsApp and Instagram
- Whatsapp was bought for 19 bil, at a time when it was #3 in the US and dominant in major parts of the world. It’s buying it about 5 years too late to be “prescient” about it.
- Instagram was a better deal, but far from “buying it before it grows big”. bought for 1 bil two years after it launched it was already well on track for 20 million users. If they had bought it a year earlier they would have gotten it really cheap, granted. They bought it right after it exploded.
Now, I’m not saying Facebook wouldn’t love to buy competitors, but the examples are kinda weird, in particular WhatsApp. Plus again, the fediverse is so tiny the only reason someone at Facebook probably knows about it is because a lawyer told them to tell 3 engineers to get this done, by which point they didn’t even read the wikipedia and just told them to do it because legal says they should.
