this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Sry, I‘m still not following. I don’t understand your argument, are you saying they want to federate to gain additional users to grab data from? Because I don’t think that’s going to be a significant amount of people.
Most people don’t care about what makes the fediverse desirable to its current users, all it does is add friction to them and therefore I don’t see it growing much either.
I think the reason why meta wants to federate is this:
I don’t think they’re doing it to "get more data" or to "take over the fediverse". There’s nothing worth taking over and they can probably get the data anyways, it’s all openly available. So it’s basically all upside and no downside for them.
What happens if you merge the user base of a small network and a huge network? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect Will the small network gain from the huge one or the other way round? Also there is a lot to gain. The users base of the fediverse and it's infrastructure grew by 5x in the last two years: https://fedidb.org/ Meta has a big interest in extinguishing a competitor before it profits from the bandwagon effect.
Active users went down, though. I don’t think mastodon is a big competitor for Meta, Twitter and TikTok are.
If they thought the fediverse was insignificant they wouldn’t even bother. Them spending publicly visible time and energy on it means there’s something for them to gain.
But yeah, I’m not entirely sure what yet. Like you said, reading data is freely available, so it’s not just that.