Technology

Meta is not going to "use" this technology, they want to own it. And you can be certain they will try their best to build a walled garden with a Facebook login, so the masses pick their form of fediverse rather than the one not controlled by big tech.

Peoples negativity comes from experience with these corporations. You are probably pretty young if you don't see how bad they are.

Early on when Google wasn't shit and Facebook was just coming out of the startup phase both of them had chat platforms based on XMPP (the OG federating protocol). For a few glorious moments everyone could chat with anyone through the corresponding XMPP endpoints. At some point they decided they can't be arsed anymore and shut off federation on their servers. They captured enough market and siloed their users.

There's 1 million % this will happen again. It's textbook EEE.

Well done on Mastodon admins for not cooperating with Facebook's strong arming tactics. Facebook's server will evolve into another walled garden, Mastodon federating with them will only help them.

Fuck them

I think it'll be harder than that, even.

Meta doesn't need to spin up an instance to abuse user data on the fediverse, they just need an app that can read it. A hypothetical meta fediverse app could allow users to select their own instance and still read and collect data on the connected instances. As far as I know, there is no way in the protocol to prevent this.