this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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Will I use it? Absolutely not.
Do I hope that it gets used by others? Yeah, at least a bit. Because if Meta assigns more engineers to work on fedi tech like improving ActivityPub that would be a huge win for the fediverse in general. That assumes they actually contribute to open source, but Meta/FB actually has a reasonable track record there.
I’d agree, except for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Seems more likely that they’ll end up harming the fediverse before they improve things for us.
With open-source, I see it more a question of "How much will they freely give us?" Any proprietary extensions to ActivityPub is simply irrelevant to open-source projects, and would ultimately isolate their product from working with existing FOSS-powered infrastructure. If Facebook gives us a few bug fixes and dips into proprietary bullshit, I could that as a win. Who cares if they create some crazy proprietary version of ActivityPub? For most of the people that use things like Mastodon or Lemmy because they're privacy-conscious or dislike for-profit motivations in their software, they probably are willing to put up with a bit of a feature delta (as in fewer features on open-source software) to stay with software and hosters that aren't in it for the money.
For example, you could say that Autodesk creating the free tier of Fusion 360 with non-commercial restrictions has dampened the potential of individuals to freely license their work, but FreeCAD has happily coexisted for a long time. Sure, it's UX hell and is a bit rough around the edges, but holy shit is it amazing that I can license my work any damn way I please. That right there is worth infinitely more to me than some polished proprietary turd that tries to control me. I think many people will feel the same way about Lemmy or Mastodon, and Facebook's attempts to win over favor will be soiled by their proprietary nature. And heck, Lemmy itself is already impressively good for as new as it is. If Mastodon is even half as good, I'm sure the diehards will stay put.
Assuming they don't mess with fediverse protocols, here's hoping that I could interact with their users without using Meta's proprietary apps, when it's absolutely necessary. (This is separate from mastodon instances choosing to defederate from Meta servers)
If anyone is chiming in with "just plain don't", I'm talking of situations like Spanish speaking countries where every single fucking thing is done through whatsapp. Everything. There's no avoiding it.
If I can use a self hosted instance and foss app to talk to the borg instead of their borgware, that's a tiny point in my favor.
Honestly, things will go smooth as long as the Fediverse doesn’t scramble to adopt Meta protocols. Which, given the attitude I’ve been seeing, hopefully shouldn’t happen.
(We’ve seen how this went with Google and XMPP).