So, recently some fediverse admins (mostly Mastodon) and the founder of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko (Gargron), where contacted by Meta/Facebook for an NDA meeting. We know nothing about it, but we’re pretty sure that it was about this project92 thing that Meta/Facebook is creating to “compete” with Twitter.
So a lot of Mastodon admins already singed a pact to immediately block any Meta/Facebook activity in the fediverse as soon as it comes up. My Mastodon instance, fosstodon.org hasn’t singed that pact and I’m pretty worried.
The following image is an screenshot of Gargron and dansup (creator of Pixelfed) talking about this. These posts were deleted, even from the wayback machine.
They only really need mastodon.social to be on board, as their brand itself can do the rest to compete with twitter, so this discussion is kinda of moot.
I personally don’t like it for mastodon, that will definitely lower the standards and bring a lot of advertising wether we like it or not. For other fediverse communities however, I think this is a good thing. It will be much easier to bring the people we want to it once the fediverse is more “popularized”.
They won’t moderate properly. They don’t moderate products they have now. It’s going to attract so much spam, scammers, botting, account harvesting, and everything else that ruins online communities.
The only thing I can see working is if they simply make it simple to set up and host instances. Even then, they’ll dig their claws into it and mess it up.
They can’t even make the most popular reselling platforms in the world work properly.