A large corporate shopping mall settles in a nice neighborhood with small local run shops and community centers. The new shopping mall says ‘if we settle here, more people will come, and you all will benefit’. A few years later all small shops are bankrupt and the community is destroyed. What remains is a barren corporate landscape.
This is fascinating to me and there’s like 9 people here talking about it and most everyone is against Meta integrating with the fediverse. It doesn’t feel very self aware as a community. The more the merrier for the Fediverse and if you don’t like it, join a smaller project or find one with the privacy policy that suites you. Maybe I’m misunderstanding how this all works, but it seems like if this continues that this giving small projects access to an unprecedented number of users that are no stone walled by private networks. Obviously Meta will protect their self interests but if this is a way for them to break into some of the Twitter space then so be it. Perhaps they contribute funds for some fediverse back end development and it’s a win-win.
In principal yes, but not at any cost!
Keep in mind that the Fediverse is also a distributed governance model, and it can be seriously harmed if one bad actor gets too much leverage. Meta’s business model is to control as much of the users and content as possible, which runs counter to the idea of the Fediverse. They want to use it to bootstrap their new app, but they’ll try to superseed it as soon as they have enough leverage to do so.
The good thing about decentralized platforms is that you don’t have to immediately cede the public square to corporate ownership or resign yourself to sharing space with the worst bad actors.