Mastodon

Facebook launched in 2004, 19 years ago, and bears more responsibility than just about any organization in Silicon Valley for the proliferation of abusive, invasive, proprietary, walled garden social media platforms. They function as an integral pillar of the state's mass surveillance and propaganda operations. They have been complicit in many pogroms, including a genocide in Myanmar.

I assure you, they haven't suddenly had a change of heart. They have a long history of acquiring their competitors and rolling them into their own private corporate infrastructure. If they intend to make a move on the Fediverse, there is no reason to believe their intent is any different than what their corporate history demonstrates.

I think most people worry about a Embrace Extend Extinguish scenario.

I predict this:

1. Meta comes out with their own mastodon server, open source and free
2. They extend it with a boatload of features
3. Instance admins switch to the Meta implementation in order to be compatible
4. Once enough admins are reliant on Meta, kill the open-source server and go closed source

Meta's earned no such goodwill.

There is a page, albeit buried, dedicated to "why?": https://fedipact.online/why

I don't know that it's much of a punishment for adopting open standards. The open standard is there to be used, the engineering work crowdsourced for the benefit of all. Meta gets the used of the standard and access to a not-insignificant portion of the federated services that don't bother blocking them.

It will likely be one of the columns when the inevitable Lemmy Instance comparison charts are created: registration type, country, bans illegal content, blacklists meta services, etc ...

Poor Meta, that up and coming corporation. When will somebody think of the billionaires?