Meta is more likely to pull people away from Twitter than Mastodon is, and having all of Twitter be run with ActivityPub / open to federation is a good thing.
masterspace
joined 1 year ago
We must have zero-tolerance for corporations or we might as well just give up.
As long as servers cost money to run, corporations will need to be involved.
At a fundamental level, it's either
a) run by donations as a non profit, but as we've seen from wikipedia it will be a constant struggle to have enough money to last indefinitely (especially since Reddit / kbin / lemmy cost a lot more to run than Wikipedia)
b) run by subscriptions, which will greatly limit growth, reach, search engine optimization, etc.
c) run by advertising in which case corporate ad networks (like the kind that Meta runs) will need to be involved or
d) have instances that are government run / paid for, but it would be difficult to accomplish on a global scale and may come with restrictions that not everyone is happy with
It sucks but those are pretty much the only four options for running a digital community that requires paid servers and hosting space. Either corporations or some large government organization are going to have to be involved.
Isn't the point of federation that those communities would federate and then have merged comments sections? Or am I misunderstanding how it works?
The crappy scripts that I wrote while teaching myself to code at an electrical engineering / architecture firm are used more often than the professional software I've built for FAANG and Fortune 500 companies since.
Instead of putting everyone who is interesting in technology together, (which is an very large group of people), you can subdivide people.
That already happened with both threads, and subreddits themselves. From that standpoint, the fediverse is just duplicating existing functionality
That's an upside, but it's not necessarily a "good" thing to be fragmented if it means you don't have the network effects to make a satisfying community.
End of the day a lot of Reddit's value came from its popularity.
Having a larger market = having a larger network = greater network effects for content
Having Meta join with Mastodon might actually sway people off twitter and into the fediverse where it will be easier to migrate over to a different instance.
It's foolish not to hear them out, you accomplish nothing. This isn't some silicon valley episode where he has some arkane secrets that meta engineers couldn't figure out that he might leak. Meeting with them is zero risk and he would gain more information on what they're planning.