Fediverse

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founded 1 year ago

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What will Meta gain from fediversing? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I don't understand what Meta will gain from participating in the fediverse? Their ultimate goal is to make money of Threads and I just don't see how encouraging an open federation will help them do it? Even 3Eing the fediverse will not do them much good as they already have sooo much traffic already that killing the fediverse will not make a serious change in their figures. But OTOH it does seem like Threads is net positive for the fediverse ATM. Even if all current denizens of the fediverse will block Threads, there is a large group of people that are exposed to the concept of "fediverse" for the fist time and some of them will want to learn more. This is a good thing. Anyway, I don't know why they are doing it, but I'm cautiously glad they did it. Thanks for coming to my Ted talk.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Honestly I somewhat agree with this. I get the fear about Meta hurting the Fediverse by federating with it and then acting maliciously (XMPP), but I actually think it's an "I'm not trapped in here with you..." type of situation. I would point to the example of AOL giving its users access to Usenet / the WWW -- their hand was forced a little bit if they wanted to stay relevant, but I actually could see an argument that the community network was so compelling, and so outside the control of AOL if someone else wanted to compete with them on it, that that increased awareness of the world outside AOL was just one more factor that contributed to their downfall. They went from being their own wildly successful content provider to a captive audience, to being a bargain-basement ISP no different than thousands of others, to being irrelevant.

IDK what I would do if I were Meta, sitting on this aging flagship platform and trying to stay relevant with a clear and compelling exit door available for my users. Also, clearly I don't have a multi-billion dollar company to argue for my own qualifications, but that said, I think what I would do in that situation is:

Put serious effort and attention into making FB / Instagram / Whatsapp / etc a useful and rewarding platform for people to interact with each other
Try to come up with genuinely compelling functionality and apps that are a reason for people to be on their platforms instead of somewhere else

What I wouldn't do is:

Change my name to Meta and hope no one ties "Meta" to "Facebook" mentally when they're writing off Facebook as a obsolete and boomer-ized platform
Do anything to help build awareness of the Fediverse in my user base
Keep my actual platform 90% the same (notably the central place advertising has in dictating operations)

Edit: I am wrong (at least as far as the AOL parts). I was confusing AOL with some of the other walled-garden networks that granted their users web access as the web took off, but it was a web provider from the very beginning in addition to having its own little AOL services. Usenet access came later, but even that was pretty early in their history, well before their downfall. My analysis sounds compelling maybe but I think it's 100% wrong now that I've looked a little more into AOL's history. I looks to me now like they mostly got destroyed by broadband replacing dialup and being unable to pivot away from their dialup-centric roots.