this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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What does ethics have to do with any of this? Like you said, it's all capitalism. The total amount of users in the fediverse is a rounding error on their 10-K. Why would they care about stealing the userbase?
Corporations don't act ethically unless they can monetize it or they're regulated.
Counterpoint: it’s not about capturing the current audience so much as heading a threat off at the pass.
I’m not going to argue way or other re: defederation. Just putting myself in their shoes and looking at the field they’re entering. They likely recognize there’s a brief window right now to capture twitter’s disaffected audience as they stumble while a nontrivial subset of those users are exploring open-source, non-corporate alternatives.
It makes perfect sense for them to cast the widest net they can in this moment. And it also makes sense for them to try to stifle the non-corporate side before it has a chance to gain any solid footing.
There are no users “exploring open source alternatives.” Have you seen the Lemmy signup flow? It’s a complete shitshow that probably turns away 95% of people to begin with.
Facebook almost certainly doesn’t see Lemmy and Mastodon as a threat or competitor. They adopted ActivityPub because it’s nice, and they’ll move on as they need to scale, and Lemmy and Mastodon will continue to survive as they always have.
What’s 95% of zero?
Seriously though I am one person seeking open source alternatives and I came here because others showed me the way.
The number is not zero, and the cultural moment is ripe for non-corporate options unless corporates recapture the audience before they’ve even lost them.
That’s the crux of my perspective.