Meta and the Fediverse: The Duopoly that could shape the Web to come
Meta and the Fediverse: The Duopoly that could shape the Web to come
The Fediverse will soon have power on the social web to shape its future, but only through and in the interaction with Meta. This is the reality the Fediverse has to start arranging itself with. Mo…
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I think it's wonderful that you're so passionate about the fediverse. However your main argument seems to be that Meta enriches the Fediverse with money.
But you're not addressing the fact that profit driven endeavours result in things like the fact that they broke the law to snoop on snapchat users.
Where does the push for profit stop? Why do you feel that the fediverse needs money and what alternatives have you looked at beside Silicon Valley?
There are things like communick and I'm a proponent of cooperatives, whereby you get XX people to contribute the amount to split the costs of a server, management, a domain and software development donations and as more people join, the cost is spread out more.
What is it exactly that Meta offer? Where do you think they'll invest that cooperatives can't?
My biggest problem is how people refuse to integrate monetization into federated platforms. Some standard transactional system of sorts that could allow small platforms to create revenue streams for creators.
Not having that means Threads will be the only platform that makes such functions available, and you know they'll have a quota based incentive system much like YouTube to get all the creators their side of things.
This is bad for musicians, film makers, animators, etc. And if you're idea is that "you can just link to someone's Patreon account or their PayPal wallet", then we're right back to the same problem again.
Believing that in 2024 you can just ignore monetization within platforms means you're just leaving a hole in the fence for which nefarious actors can sneak in. It's better if we standardise and normalise ethical payment models and have them readily available across platforms.
We need a federated, decentralised SWIFT for the fediverse - believe it or not.
People aren't adverse to monetizing aspects of the Fediverse, but what they don't want is simply adding a Fediverse sticker to existing trains of thought and ideas and calling it done.
The confusion a lot of people have is that the Fediverse is a phoenix that grew from the ashes of Twitter and the reality is that it existed long before.
People are suggesting that the people that built the communities they've joined should compromise because new blood is here and the Fediverse has said, sure, let's see your ideas and we can discuss it and people are like, well we want the old stuff with a Fediverse sticker, compromise!
The Fediverse wouldn't be as big without any of the newer people and I include myself in that, even though my original Mastodon predates Elon even flirting with Twitter, but it was fine. It was fun. It had a good community and that's why it was a viable option. The Fediverse doesn't need us. If we have discussions with humility, perhaps we can find solutions together.
But I mean, already lots about the buzz caused around the Fediverse nowadays only EXISTS because Meta anounced to join
The most obvious thing is: scale. With matter, ActivityPub is finally tried out on a bigger scale. If a global, big fediverse was the goal, this was always one way how it could go. A big player is joining and then, the Fediverse in turn grows and grows with it; just like with the WWW and AOL. What's your alternative to this?
Or don't you want the Fediverse to become a big, global thing where everyone has a Fediverse account and so on?
If you want to write blogs, you need to be objective. The Fediverse is big. Perhaps you should start out by familiarizing yourself with it and why Meta choose it over starting something new.
Because its currently the most open and easy to extend for them?
You're being lazy. I know you're better than that. They already have a platform in Facebook. They could do what Spoutible did and buy a Twitter clone to extend it. They could even do what Truth Social did and fork mastodon. They did none of that.
Scale in a single closed off data-center does not improve the scaling of the fediverse. In fact it might kill off a lot of smaller fediverse instances and software that arn't able to keep up with the data-center firehose Meta is pointing at them if they are unlucky. As a result organic growth to scale will likely stop and only those that can throw lots of hardware at the problem will survive.