I’m not seeing any ads, and these servers certainly have a cost… So is this place entirely donation based, or what?

  • Zelda@lemmy.ninja
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    2 years ago

    Shit thats scary! Is there any way the Fediverse can collaborate to stop their takeover?

    Because it definitely sounds like that’s their intent. There’s no benefit to Facebook embracing an ad-free, trackerless standard unless it’s taking over.

    Thank you for your clear explanation btw!

    • Dave@lemmy.nz
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      2 years ago

      Is there any way the Fediverse can collaborate to stop their takeover?

      There is a movement to get Fediverse instances to agree to block Meta. I guess if everyone did this, the Fediverse would continue on and Meta would probably be fine building their own platform.

      But Meta has something the rest of the Fediverse doesn’t have: money. They can simply pay some carefully chosen instances to Fedirate with them (which might be what the secret conversations are about).

      There will also likely be a bit of a fight between instances that do or don’t Federate with Meta, some thinking it’s good because of the new userbase and some thinking it’s bad because of the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish thing. That alone will probably cause damage as well, possibly splitting the already small userbase into two factions.

      Meta is making a twitter/mastodon-like site, so Lemmy might get to have a wait and see approach, but if Meta start changing (Extending) the ActivityPub protocol then the dozens of different platforms on the Fediverse will all have to decide whether to change too or no longer be able to Federate with anyone who does change.

      One of the benefits of Facebook Federating with Mastodon is the users. Building a new platform is hard but if on day 1 you can already follow millions of others then this helps. But after a month thay probably won’t be very important, so it will be interesting to see what they do next.