Facebook is planning to join the Fediverse by releasing a Twitter-like service that runs on ActivityPub. This would flood the Fediverse with content (and trolls) from Facebook, allow Facebook to mine data from the Fediverse, and would do irreparable damage to this small part of the internet which has not yet been marred by corporate greed.
Will the admins of this instance agree to block any instance that is set up by Facebook?
This is just such a stupid Idea.
Facebook (and anyone else!) already can “mine” the fediverse for data.
it’s open.
that’s the point.Will Facebook suddenly become the largest player in the fediverse, sure.
Should that make one wary, also, sure.But why would we want to discourage them?
Better they also use ActivityPub than not!
if the need arises, it can be blocked, if not, great.I’d love it if Whatsapp moved to XMPP and I could use different Apps to communicate with friends on there for example.
/e: we should be paranoid if facebook proposes changes to the protocol.
I think, there must be decent people working at facebook, so while “we” should be paranoid, we should also be willing to listen.- Whatsapp started on XMPP
- Facebook used to have XMPP
- Google used to have XMPP
It’s foolish to think they won’t try to put their users back behind a wall once they think they can make more money that way.
My real worry though is with moderation. Will monolith like Meta be willing to respond to complaints from small instance admins? Or will they think that more flamewars = more pageviews = more ads served?
Facebook used XMPP to entice users to befriend Facebook users, then when they had enough market share they killed support for XMPP, forcing everyone who hadn’t yet joined facebook to join or lose their contacts who were on Facebook. There used to be times where you could just use Trillian to talk to people on multiple platforms (including MSN and Facebook) at the same time, and that died off as the walls grew taller.
ActivityPub is a competitor to Facebooks walled garden. I would not doubt they would try to try and cannibalize it.
I miss when trillian or a well configured Pidgin client was all you needed to talk to EVERYONE. Now half my friends have telegram, three have Facebook, the normies insist on sending me exploding videos on Snapchat that start playing muted so I can’t even hear what they are trying to say, then work wants me to use the crew app, friends want me on discord, I just want to use session.
Is a mess
