That’s the problem. I can see a future where very few users and trolls “opt-in” to fediverse integration and for a while meta doesn’t rock the boat and actually contributes to the fediverse as a whole.
But Zuck would have us under ransom. All he has to do, if the fediverse starts threatening his business is turn on all accounts for federation, and it would quickly overwhelm the small independent operators. The fediverse would essentially be controlled by meta.
It’s the parable of the frog and the scorpion
I think it more likely that over time, after threads has captured enough of the user base fleeing Twitter and other social media platforms, threads will start pushing a sub-fediverse of sorts that will involve most of the major fediverse platforms, i.e. the ones run by people who attend the get togethers Meta invites them to. Slowly but surely that will be cemented as the primary “section” of the fediverse, “the Meta-fediverse”, and in order to join it, you’ll have to commit to their standards. And just like that, the decentralized platform has become centralized.
They’re willing to play with all the kids on the playground right now, but that will change. It’s bizarre to me that the fediverse has such a strong population of left-leaning users, that all came here spitting on the capitalist-poisoned platforms they fled, and yet somehow there are so many people around here that don’t see the danger of letting Meta in. They will find a way to fuck all of this up.
Committing to the idea of the fediverse will not benefit their bottom line in the long run. It is antithetical to the platform dominance that creates their profits.
Yep. I very much agree with all of you. Here’s how I phrased it in Embrace, Extend, and Exploit: Meta’s plan for ActivityPub, Mastodon and the fediverse
Of course, if and when Meta sees the fediverse as a significant threat, they’ll ruthlessly stamp it out.
But right now, they’ve got a huge potential longer-term opportunity to coopt the fediverse as a basis for decentralized surveillance capitalism. It might not work out, of course, but even if it doesn’t keeping a neutered fediverse around might still be useful to Meta as long as it’s not a threat to their dominance (just as Google subsidizes the Firefox browser).
