this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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They'll try to dominate the way the protocols evolve. Try to push more and more crap into it because they're too big to ignore. Insert becoming ad, bot, corporate friendlier stuff. Fediverse doesn't need meta. It's nice and cosy and rather friendly here, I'ld like it to stay that way. It's like Google dominates some "open source" and pushes browsers towards more and more DRM friendly etc. We don't need that.
And absolutely irrelevant in terms of impact. We have at best a few hundred MAU on a good month. Facebook/Google/TikTok are controlling billions of people.
If we truly believe in the superiority of the Fediverse and that it is possible to have an alternative social media for everyone, we need to go and fight Big Tech. Defederating on the grounds of "I like it the way it is" is coward, selfish and completely lacking ambition.
Fight them by...doing exactly what they want?
Do they want us to let them federate so that their users can use Threads as a stepping stone out of the walled gardens?
Why would that happen?
People who used Google Talk didn't use it as a stepping stone to XMPP. They stayed on Google Talk.
Google was not charging people to talk on their network, and they didn't make it harder to reach someone once they got it. So there was no reason for people to jump out. Facebook, on the other hand...
When the internet was in its infancy, companies and small businesses first established their online presence by getting a aol.com or hotmail.com. Running your own email or website was still expensive and not something easy to do. Today, having "your own" social media and being in control of your brand is almost as easy as having your website and your domain. I am not saying that everyone will jump out of Threads, but if Threads ever gets successful enough to replace Twitter and if we don't shut them out of the Fediverse before it happens, at least there will be an opportunity for small businesses/media orgs/influencers that want to keep reaching their audiences (like they do today on Twitter/Facebook/Youtube/etc) and also want to take control of their own presence.
That's not dependent on federating at all. Meta is a member of W3C, they can be a part of developing and evolving ActivityPub at any point without actively running a service with it.