A large corporate shopping mall settles in a nice neighborhood with small local run shops and community centers. The new shopping mall says ‘if we settle here, more people will come, and you all will benefit’. A few years later all small shops are bankrupt and the community is destroyed. What remains is a barren corporate landscape.
This is fascinating to me and there’s like 9 people here talking about it and most everyone is against Meta integrating with the fediverse. It doesn’t feel very self aware as a community. The more the merrier for the Fediverse and if you don’t like it, join a smaller project or find one with the privacy policy that suites you. Maybe I’m misunderstanding how this all works, but it seems like if this continues that this giving small projects access to an unprecedented number of users that are no stone walled by private networks. Obviously Meta will protect their self interests but if this is a way for them to break into some of the Twitter space then so be it. Perhaps they contribute funds for some fediverse back end development and it’s a win-win.
The more the merrier for the Fediverse
In principal yes, but not at any cost!
Keep in mind that the Fediverse is also a distributed governance model, and it can be seriously harmed if one bad actor gets too much leverage. Meta’s business model is to control as much of the users and content as possible, which runs counter to the idea of the Fediverse. They want to use it to bootstrap their new app, but they’ll try to superseed it as soon as they have enough leverage to do so.
The more the merrier for the Fediverse and if you don’t like it,
join a smaller project or find one with the privacy policy that suites you.defederate
The good thing about decentralized platforms is that you don’t have to immediately cede the public square to corporate ownership or resign yourself to sharing space with the worst bad actors.
Embrace, Extend, and Enshittify.
Today I learned about embrace, expand and extinguish. Many fear this is Meta’s plan for the fediverse.
It’s more like inclosure.
I have no desire to see facebook in the fediverse, but that’s not really gentrification, it’s more like Walmart. (Anti-competitive corporate monopoly suppressing competition and forcing everyone to serve their bottom line)
Gentrification refers to the displacement of poor and working class people, and especially people of color, by affluent people, especially white. That’s not the specific dynamic here, in no small part because Mastodon has been self-gentrifying[1] aggressively from the beginning. (It is jokingly referred to as the HOA of the internet)
Through white techies being constantly obnoxious to POC who have the temerity to try to join the fediverse, the particular culture of content warning policing, and lack of discoverability making it hard to form community. Note: there’s no reason to think facebook would improve any of this. ↩︎
