this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Our exchange here is public, a gift to humanity and all aliens that might stumble upon it. If meta can make money from it, so be it. But anyone else can just as well.
Except they can build proprietary code on top of it and take over open-sourced activitypub adoption
It's just another way to kill competition
The people who would use a Meta variant will use it, and people like us will not. This reminds me of the interview with the Mexican restaurant that spawned Taco Bell. The lady who owned it essentially said, "I'm glad he (the founder of Taco Bell) was able to take our teachings and turn it into something. Good for him." If they build proprietary code, that's nice. ActivityPub will still be the same open-source code it's always been, and all of the Fediverse stuff will still exist. It kinda sucks that Meta is trying to make it seem like they're the good guys, but in the end there isn't much they can do to the already established stuff beyond make their own.
Edit: also, if they do try anything, we at least have previous data and most of the people who care about freedom to privacy here that I'm sure we could come up with something. We're not getting blindsided like with Google and XMPP back in the day.
The "extend" part is fundamental before they can actually get to the "extinguish" stage: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Once Meta joins in, a new set of dynamics are going to develop between old fediverse uses and new meta/fediverse users. If Meta adopts an "EEE" approach such as the ones described in the article, there's going to be disruption in the user experience from which the fediverse might never fully recover
Edit: clarification on the last sentence, my main concern is that a growing niche protocol such as ActivityPub might be destined to irrelevancy after Meta is done with the Extend & Extinguish, similarly to what happened to XMPP