this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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I think the biggest risk is "Embrace Extend Extinguish".
Kind of like how FB Messenger is based off XMPP.
Facebook puts out their new Twitter clone and embraces the fediverse to get access to our community and content.
Facebook extends the fediverse and adds reaction emojis and videos that only show up on MetaTwitter, not on Mastodon. This draws all the users to MetaTwitter and makes them the defacto instance for federated microblogging.
After a few years as MetaTwitter becomes an institution, they extinguish their open-source competition by blocking federation, and now all the Mastodon users have to make MetaTwitter accounts if they want to keep microblogging with their friends.
This happened with Internet Explorer, XMPP, and it's ongoing right now with Google's Amp email and project Fuschia.
Any attempt to extend GPL code in a non GPL way is an attack on our rights as users.
That, and Meta has the infrastructure/paid developers to develop features/respond to issues much faster, which might cause more casual users to migrate over because they see things they desire.
Another worry I've seen around is that if the Meta instance is not blocked/defederated, it could aggregate all that data and sell it, which is something lots of people explicitly do not want.
My question is. Isn’t all of this true regardless of whether people block them or not? Meta still has a huge audience and they could still do everything you outlined here.
Yeah I think the main risk is Meta using Open-Source's accomplishments, or good will, to help their proprietary software compete with open-source software.
They don't have to make their Twitter clone federated at all, but because they're making it federated, it harms existing fediverse users because they can use the communities to promote proprietary software, and they can use federation to "opensource-wash" their proprietary software. This competition takes away potential users of open-source software and allows Meta to have control over the fediverse.