The concern is if they don't fork yet, grow a huge userbase that dominates the fediverse and app landscape, then start messing with the underlying protocol to their advantage. Look at what Google did with browsers and email as an example.
That's where the fediverse already expecting an eventual fork makes me think actions like preemptive defederation will keep meta from totally dominating. Sure the web of meta's instance and instances that federate with meta will have a higher population, but that doesn't lessen the number of members currently in instances that defederate meta and stick to spec. Most ActivityPub based platforms aren't being run for profit and just want to run their own community so there isn't an inherent need to follow any changes that meta eventually does or does not make to chase more users. If an instance defeds meta, then what meta does has zero effect on them. As long as enough do that (and the current energy seems to be that enough will) then you still have a healthy, if small, fediverse doing it's own thing without meta.
The concern is if they don't fork yet, grow a huge userbase that dominates the fediverse and app landscape, then start messing with the underlying protocol to their advantage. Look at what Google did with browsers and email as an example.
That's where the fediverse already expecting an eventual fork makes me think actions like preemptive defederation will keep meta from totally dominating. Sure the web of meta's instance and instances that federate with meta will have a higher population, but that doesn't lessen the number of members currently in instances that defederate meta and stick to spec. Most ActivityPub based platforms aren't being run for profit and just want to run their own community so there isn't an inherent need to follow any changes that meta eventually does or does not make to chase more users. If an instance defeds meta, then what meta does has zero effect on them. As long as enough do that (and the current energy seems to be that enough will) then you still have a healthy, if small, fediverse doing it's own thing without meta.
And XMPP with Google Talk.