this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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There's a business strategy called embrace, extend, extinguish that they'll try to use to snuff out the fediverse.
They'll make a bespoke federated service, collect all the data of their users (and all the people on other networks their users interact with), make it all shiny and fancy and add a ton of improvements most networks don't have yet. And if they can reach a critical mass of users, they can track a huge cross section of federated activity, and force networks to play by their rules or lose access to their entire userbase. It's the same thing google did to email.
Um, isn't everything everyone does on the fediverse public? I assume it's all being tracked already. By search engines as a bare minimum, but anyone else (including Meta) who does any kind of research/etc. And they don't need to be federated to do it, they can just crawl the network with HTTP.
As for "forcing networks to play by their rules" I don't see that happening, and Google hasn't done it with email. Gmail doesn't have enough marketshare for that. At best they've forced people to make sure they have good outbound spam filtering. That's not just google, every email provider (including small on premise office mail servers) has that policy.
I'm not saying we should federate them (personally I'm undecided) but your explanation hasn't convinced me.
I wish I remember where I read this recently, but supposedly any email provider outside of like the main 5 will have a lot more trouble getting through gmail spam filters, which is a major push towards getting people to use gmail or one of the other main providers