The thing that saddens me the most about the whole fedi/meta drama is a thing I can't prove, but that I think is likely because I've worked in these kinds of tech companies.
The notion that Meta is looking to embrace/extend/extinguish the fediverse is laughable. The entire fedi userbase is a rounding error for Meta. They arent looking to take down the fediverse, they're trying to take down TWITTER.
They want the celebs and journalists back. Take advantage of Twitter's tarnished reputation.
I can virtually guarantee that "let's join the fediverse!" wasn't Mark Zuckerberg's idea.
It was probably some engineer that likes the fediverse concept, who had this long-shot idea. Everyone said the top brass would never go for it, but they put together a slide deck and presented federation as a powerful tool to take down Twitter together.
And against all odds, the executive team went for it.
That engineer probably became the lead for the whole effort to federate. Reached out to some big admins to ask ActivityPub questions. Wanted to show mockups to ask the experts if ActivityPub could support their designs, so an NDA was standard.
That engineer stuck their neck out to solve their employer's business need while also supporting open tech.
Put their reputation on the line to do what they thought was good for fedi and bring millions of users.
The response must be humiliating.
when individuals act as representatives of large corporations it is actively manipulative to pretend that rejecting their employer is a personal insult. when i represented twitter open source at scaladays and people raised concerns about how twitter largely developed their own scala stack without reference to the rest of the scala community, i listened to them and understood that they were speaking to the real fear of the organization i represented and didn't take it personally. in fact, i stepped up to the challenge and learned a lot from doing so, and gave extremely useful feedback to twitter afterwards. hold corporations accountable and don't fall for smol bean rhetoric just because they present the face of an individual https://mastodon.social/@rodhilton/110613469075600643
Rod Hilton
d@nny disc@ mc²