I’m seeing discussions on other instances about how a “federated” corporate instance should be handled, i.e. Meta, or really any major company.

What would kbin.social’s stance be towards federating/defederating with a Meta instance?

Or what should that stance be?

  • 50gp@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    I wonder if theres any way to pre emptively stop them from taking over activitypubs development and direction

    • parrot-party@kbin.social
      1·
      1 year ago

      They can’t do a hostile take over of ActivityPub. The trap is that they would come in with open arms and an army of developers. ActivityPub maintainers would at first welcome the help and guidance from such an experienced team. Then, once they have the community hooked, they spring the trap and start making changes that are actively hostile to small sites. The community flocks to the big site because everything works better there, and the dream is dead.

      Now maybe it’ll never happen, but it’s hard to tell. Even if Facebook joined with the best intentions, that doesn’t mean the project isn’t going to be taken over by a power hungry manager later who could still activate the trap card.

      • wagesj45@kbin.social
        0·
        1 year ago

        this is the closest someone has come to convincing me that this would be a big problem. i still happen to think that the smaller instances will be fine in the long run. big consolidated instances are inevitable because people like being where people are. look at twitter and facebook. i suspect the worst problem we’d have is people switching from “facebook” to “federated facebook”.

        now maybe meta will be able to fuck with the standards body that is responsible for the standard. that would be very bad. then i’d be on board. until they do that, i won’t worry. i’m open to having my mind changed, but i’ve found most arguments to be unconvincing as they basically boil down to “but they’re big!”

        • Jo@readit.buzz
          1·
          1 year ago

          because people like being where people are

          That’s exactly the problem with mega-instances. From the link posted above:

          As expected, no Google user bated an eye. In fact, none of them realised. At worst, some of their contacts became offline. That was all. But for the XMPP federation, it was like the majority of users suddenly disappeared. Even XMPP die hard fanatics, like your servitor, had to create Google accounts to keep contact with friends. Remember: for them, we were simply offline. It was our fault.