Found this post super informative as it relates to Mastodon, and thought Lemmy might also benefit from this perspective. I’m not sure I share his optimism, but his points seem sound to dampen some of the alarm bells over Meta joining the Fediverse.
The thing is that this can happen even without active malice.
If the product owners or engineers decide “hey, we want to add this cool feature, but it’s not supported by activity pub” the path of least resistance – bypassing the long process of changing the activity pub spec and getting everyone else on board – can be super tempting, and come from a place of wanting to make your product better.
Those ostensibly good intentions can lead to E/E/E without actively meaning to.
You could argue that this is what happened to Jabber.
Although Facebook Messenger never made a good faith attempt to interoperate with Jabber in the first place.
It was Google’s GTalk not Facebook’s Messenger.
Facebook never needed Jabber for their messenger.
It was both, but Facebook Messenger was less widely known and was kind of janky. here’s a source that explains part of what was going on.
