Exactly. And they've already done your second and third bullets!
Yeah and I don't think it's fully sunk in to Zuckerberg and Mosseri that they now have to be regulars on the FediBlock and FediBlockMeta hashtags
Indeed! But here's the relevant excerpt
Of course, if and when Meta sees the fediverse as a significant threat, they'll ruthlessly stamp it out.0
But right now, they've got a huge potential longer-term opportunity to coopt the fediverse as a basis for decentralized surveillance capitalism. It might not work out, of course, but keeping a neutered fediverse around might still be useful to Meta as long as it's not a threat to their dominance (just as Google subsidizes the Firefox browser).
And in the short term, there's money to be made – and regulators to try to influence – by exploiting the fediverse.
Fair! Good and bad depends on your perspective and how successful Meta is. It's only the last bit about "using selfishly for Meta's own ends" that I see as inherently bad. In general though I've writen elsewhere that I think it's a great opportunity for the fediverse -- I talked about about why in In Chaos There Is Opportunity and probably will say more in a later post in this series.
It's not so much that they'd take it over, it's that they'd extend it (in incompatible ways) and exploit it. XMPP still exists and there are bunches of clients for it, but it's basically where it was 15 years ago when Google et al first adopted it. Ploum's got some great pespectives on the XMPP experience at https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html and there are a lot of parallels.
Thanks for the feedback! You really don't think Evan's influential in the fediverse?
No, I'm not saying their goal is to be completely untrustworthy. It's a means to an end. And the evidence for them being completely untrustworthy isn't the quote, it's Facebook, Instagram, and Meta's long history of being completely untrustworthy. I wrote about this in Wait a second. Why should anybody trust Facebook, Instagram, or Meta?. Do you trust them?
Good question, I edited the article to clarify:
Yeah really, it's not like they every trusted Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica ... oh wait, they did.
Anyhow it's not the core of their business model. The core of their business model is harvesting data and using it to sell and target ads (and sell other stuff), Alex Jones is just one more channel to leverage.
You really think most Republicans would block it?