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.
@rodhilton When you work for the Borg, you should have enough self awareness to know people aren't going to greet your appearance like you're Santa Claus.
Name anything Meta has ever played nice with. One other site they "took interest in" that they didn't either destroy or absorb.
* React
* PyTorch
* rocksdb
* Hack / hhvm (used by Slack)
* watchman
* buck
* Hermes
* FBOSS
* phabricator
* docusaurus
* flow
* jest
* GraphQL
* Thrift
* zstd
I understand not trusting Meta or even seeing the company as evil but the level of disconnection from reality I'm seeing sometimes is staggering.
@mivox Well FWIW one of them is React, which is the very frontend component framework that the entire Mastodon web UI is written in.
Facebook built it and released it open source, and now Mastodon is built on it.
@rodhilton Nice! I wasn’t aware of that.
Still don’t trust them as far as I could throw Mark Zuckerberg tho.
@mivox yeah, understandable. That's why I don't use any Meta shit, I think the company sucks.
But I also am aware of the fact that while there are some very bizarre and inaccurate examples of Facebook's hostility toward open technologies (XMPP), there are many many examples of them playing very nice with open tech.
They very well may have ill intent. I'm just saying, based on what I'm seeing here, I think there's a more likely explanation and it's probably internal advocacy.
@rodhilton @mivox Of the items on the list I'm familiar with:
- hhvm/hack is an example of EEE against PHP that fractured the community and corporate support of the language. Prime example of what will happen to ActivityPub.
- React defaults are a debt-encouraging way to write UI but it's already "too big to fail". https://chrlschn.medium.com/thoughts-on-react-vs-vue-vs-everything-else-in-2023-e4e50e526049
- GraphQL is a great idea but the popular implementations are "my way or the highway" and only things they find useful get through committee.
Rod Hilton
mivox is exhausted 
Russell