Since news leaked out 2 days ago that Facebook has approached Mastodon developers and admins - requiring non-disclosure agreements first - the whole microverse (i.e. mastodon / pleroma etc, the micro-blogging part of fedi) has been talking about nothing but that and Facebook’s imminent entry into the fediverse with an as yet not clearly defined entity called Barcelona or p92. This woud be very roughly comparable to Reddit saying they are going to federate with lemmy.
Yet here on lemmy I could only find a relatively small discussion.
https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/62958
Did the lemmyverse not know or just not care that much?
Honestly, a lot of people might disagree but, corporate involvement is essential to FOSS projects surviving. The biggest FOSS project on the planet, Linux, is literally propped up by the biggest corporations on the planet.
The only potential issue I see here is maybe Meta forks ActivityPub and it becomes a “Meta Project” or some other fuckery. Outside of that I don’t see any major issues with it. If we want ActivityPub to become something greater, we’re going to need corporations on board. We have strong protections in place right now with a lot of the stuff that’s being used being under strong copyleft licenses, and decentralization by nature is going to allow us to opt out of a lot of the ads and tracking that takes place by being forced to use an official app.
Linux is propped up by the corps that would lose if Linux went away. Not by Zuckerberg.
My problem is that they will have their own mods, their own communities and their own content. They will flood the federated space with their content and ban people and servers they don’t like. It could easily centralise due to the sheer amount of users they bring and you will find it hard to find non Facebook based communities.
While that is true, I anticipate that as a user you can choose to block all of that, just like I could have a reddit experience without r/conservative and without ads. We will always be able to find our niches, the size of which is determined by how many people share your values.
That being said, it’s indeed up to us to make sure the largest communities don’t end up on some weird fork that has ads.