this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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I don't like Meta, I don't like Facebook and I don't like anything Zuckerberg does, including him. But I think that we're overreacting and creating assumptions that perhaps won't be true.
Everyone is free to de-federate or not to de-federate from that project. But let's think for a minute. ActivityPub projects are open source, that means that everyone can read the code of a specific project, being Mastodon or Lemmy. That won't change, it's not so easy, luckily for us.
Can they add on features that aren't part of the spec? Sure, they can, but everyone is free to add those features to their projects, it's not mandatory. Their project won't be another Mastodon instance, or another Misskey instance, but an independent project inside ActivityPub. It's like saying that Pleroma is Mastodon, that's not true.
Can they cut ActivityPub support? Well, it's their problem, ActivityPub is alive right now without their support, and we're doing pretty well.
Will they mine everyone's data along the way? That's the most serious concern for me too. But unless we look at their code, we don't know yet.
Good comment. Everybody can mine the public data of the fediverse, so you don't have to own an instance to do so. I think this is an interesting move from Meta. It is a different situation than the times Facebook and Google did embrace, extend and extinguish. Now the userbase of ActivityPub is much bigger than for example XMPP was back when FB&Google supported those. Let's see how this pans out.
The good thing about this is that we know Meta's plans. It's not a secret. It would be worse if, suddenly, a Meta instance appeared right here with its millions of users and we were naked.
We should be prepared by the time Meta comes to the fediverse. But this is not the wild west. First we ask, and afterwards we shoot if necessary.