this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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The 'embrace, extend, extinguish' strategy is a well known one. Set out with a strategy to become the biggest instance, capture lots and lots of new users. Introduce some swanky new features that 'unfortunately initially don't federate very well, but we are working in that'. Then defederate from other instances that don't adopt your features - etc etc
Facebook has done federation before - for example, back when they weren't winning at chat, they integrated their chat system with other Jabber / XMPP servers so that people felt chat wasn't a walled garden and could talk with people using other clients.
How did it end? 7 years later, once enough people were on Facebook Chat, they closed the gates to the walled garden by completely ending XMPP support: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/07/16/131254/facebook-finally-ends-xmpp-support-for-3rd-party-chat.
So it is really just about leveraging the fediverse to get users onto their product (and their current products, while they are similar in that they are about social networking, aren't really like exactly like Lemmy or Mastodon). If they are successful enough, what is to stop them locking the gate to the walled garden again?
But they won't be capturing new users from the Fediverse, they will capture them from Facebook and Instagram, and since this is mainly a Twitter competitor, also from Twitter.
I think you're missing the point. We are weary of Facebook's decision to enter the Fediverse exactly because we know it sees the Fediverse as a long-term threat and it could try to extinguish it. While they at first would adopt open standards and protocols, what stops them from creating proprietary extensions and using those and its dominance and resources to make it difficult for users to switch to other platforms in the Fediverse?
Nothing, which should probably raise concerns around how good a standard ActivityPub actually is if all it takes to drive a truck through its intent is one bad actor.
Is it really fair to call Facebook just one bad actor? It's one of the largest corporations in the world, has some of the largest social media and messaging platforms out there. In terms of resources, there are very few companies, let alone individuals or groups, that can compete with Facebook.
If you look at it in these terms, you understand that Facebook has an interest in making sure that ActivityPub doesn't too large without Facebook having a say in it. If it could control the whole internet, I'm sure it would. So, no, I don't agree with your framing of the issue.
I mean, it is just one bad actor.
I don't think that ActivityPub is having any present difficulty keeping itself niche without Facebook's help - fedi has a total active user base of something like 2million, it's very literally a rounding error on Meta's user numbers. If there's a battle here, Facebook is already winning.
Here's an article that goes into detail about why Facebook joining the Fediverse means the end of the Fediverse: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html.
I'd guess the plan is that if the fediverse and meta mingles together, the fedi-users start to follow the meta users in such amount that when the breakup finally happens, they are reliant on meta to continue. People stay on facebook, eating the ads and manipulation just because their mothers and friends are there.
Just thought about the future nightmare of receiving an invite on mastodon to a friends private meta-instance "party" and to view it you are suddenly offered to either decline or import your fedi-account.