I’m just curious what you folks think. The whole idea of the Fediverse seems to go against everything Meta has stops for with their existing platforms (Facebook and Instagram).
What are they after? Are they going to try and infiltrate it so they can get people’s data and content? Are they trying to monetize it? It just doesn’t add up. I feel like most people on the Fediverse already would agree that we don’t want Meta’s platforms to access our content.
Please excuse my ignorance if it doesn’t work like I think it does. I’m relatively new to the Fediverse myself.
It seems so weird though. The fediverse is small. Extremely small. They are taking on Twitter. A million users on mastodon doesn’t matter when Twitter has 250 million.
Agreed. All this reminds me a little of some of the discussions that inevitably appear in professional-photographer circles whenever some online service with photo-sharing features changes its terms and conditions. Everyone is convinced that the giant multinational company is spending millions in a laser-focused effort to steal business from photographers, because “making money with photographs” is the lens through which they view the world. And from that point of view it’s hard to see that the entire industry of professional photography is too tiny to be worth Google’s or Meta’s time to even try to steal.
One of the things techngiants do is to get control of new startups and trends before they become big, and either consume them or destroy them.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
And weirdly, a lot of startups have the goal of being bought out by a mega-corporation in a couple of years and live off of that money.
Which does make sense. Most people work to make a living and what a better plan is there than to make something that someone pays a ton of money for and stop working. Or after that do something that you want instead of have to.
I agree that fediverse is only a few million. But the fediverse is also highly populated with refugees from twitter and reddit at the moment, who just want another stable and popular social platform similar to what they’ve always used.
If anything, the fediverse will have people with stronger opinions: either they’re willing to change social media because of a couple bad changes (and aren’t too attached to the fediverse), or they’re hardcore fediverse fans who are less likely to move to threads than your average twitter user.
If we assume it to be a 50% split, then meta has a chance at stealing half the fediverse by promising a larger user base, thus more content, but on the false premise that Threads will be backwards compatible with the fediverse forever.
