How will we keep Meta out of the fediverse?

ThinlySlicedGlizzy@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 174 points –

Is there any hope? Or is it inevitable that big corporations will take over what started as a way to escape big corporate platforms and to focus on real communities and discussions and replace it with a toxic shithole pumped full of ads?

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I don't see how they can really take over in a system that's open source and anyone willing can create their own instance. If they start taking control of a large, established base and pisses that base off, they can just collectively make and move to a new instance, walling the previous one off from the federation by blocking it.

They're supposedly in talks with activitypub, the backend of the entire fediverse. If meta can get what they want with activitypub, they'll effectively have control over the entire fediverse. I don't see that happening though because the fediverse was made in opposition of major social media sites. I see them trying to take control of the software like lemmy and kbin or if that fails trying to buy popular instances or just filling the fediverse with their existing users. Luckily if the first two fail the nature of the fediverse works in our favor and the instances that want to can just defederate.

That's like saying they're "in talks with HTTP". ActivityPub is a protocol. It's an open source standard. That standard is currently under development by the World Wide Web Consortium. There is no "ActivityPub" for them to be in talks with.

I mean, I'd sell all you fuckers out for a billion dollars. So there's a chance someone sells out somewhere along the line.

And I wouldn't hold it against you. I've had friends work at Fb for as long as they could stomach

ActivityPub is a W3C standard. I'm not sure how one can be "in talks" with a standard.

They can bribe their way into the standards commitee and then define their own standard in a way that they benefit while the rest suffers. So just like most web standards have been changed to benefit the large corporations instead of the users.

If they start taking control of a large, established base

We are not a large base. Lemmy+kbin have only a couple millions of users, and Mastodon 13 millions. Facebook is planing to migrate all Instagram accounts to P92 accounts. That means billions of users, flooding the whole fediverse.