If Facebook behave and their instances have good moderation, they'll be successful. If they don't, they'll get defederated and turn into some niche twitter clone echo chamber like Truth Social.

Facebook is a company with great open-source tech contributions (React, GraphQL) but absolutely awful products (Literally every social media thing they've got their hands on), which is why they are desperately trying to turn their side project Oculus into their main product. And I think they, as the original "The Social Network" company, see the writing on the wall: that they either embrace federation and decentralization, or get swept away by it into the footnote of social media history.

Now, I don't think Facebook wants to JUST run an instance where they get to control everything. I think the most likely scenario is that Facebook will offer easy managed federated instance setup hosted on their own cloud servers for less tech inclined individuals and companies in the future, and they'll rebrand it as "the actual metaverse", which will finally end their tenure as an advertising company.

In general, it's great when companies embrace standards and open source. Though in the case of Microsoft, they just did it to gain the market share (embrace, extend, extinguish).

I'm under no illusion that they would be doing it out of the kindness of their hearts or desire to be compliant with standards.

But..i also don't think I can criticize them yet for wanting to do so.

I think this is so interesting...

For a refreshing change, we have corporations coming to the users, not the other way around.

I'm deeply skeptical, but I'm glad communities and hubs have the power to block them outright.

I didn’t know they’d joined. Do you have a source for this?

We know very little at this point. My view is “wait and see”. Little point in speculating about things now IMHO.

All instances should defederated with corporation instances ASAP

FYI: There is already a pact among some Fediverse operators to block any instance controlled by Meta.

Nope. Money will buy blood.

I mean everyone could just not federate with them, right?

They're trojan horse. We can't stop them from creating their own servers, but we can choose to defederate them. Up with the Anti-Meta Defederation Pact

People are being really hypocritical.

You want a free open source social network. But when people you dont like join it, you hate it. That is not how it works, its not how FREE in FOSS works.

Meta can join, they can do whatever they want. It literally the point of this social network. If you dont like it, then go to a social network that is not FOSS, but is heavily moderated, because that is what most of you really want.

Pros:

• my friends join
• larger community = more content
• meta funding would likely contribute to fediverse growth and improvements
• any instance can defederate them from said instance, which would mitigate almost every con

Cons:

• Meta is evil and wants all your information to profile you and sell to other companies for profit

For myself, I'm not a fan either. But I think it could be a very good thing for the fediverse (still not a fan of that word)

which, as I understand it, is all about choice: the ability to easily access content across the fediverse, with the ability to ignore it just as easily.

If it ends up breeding toxicity, then I'll block any subs, and possibly the whole instance†. And if it gets really bad, I'll just find a lemmy/mastodon/whatever instance that has defederated from them.

† Sounds like this maybe isn't possible yet, but is being looked at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397

I think we should let them consume Fediverse content but not create it.

If Meta proposes to let Instagram users follow people on Mastodon or whatever, that seems like a reasonable compromise - they get to keep people on their feeds viewing ads and we get more reach - but they shouldn't have the power to leave and take a large % of Fediverse content with them; if you want to make a post, you need to do so from a non-Meta-controlled instance in a non-Meta-controlled app.

My problem with that is then the fediverse doesn't grow, meta controls the largest instance, and they make money off any posts that go viral here. I have to disagree for those reasons. They can go.

I view them embracing federation as a good thing.

I also view it as important for the instances I wish to follow to never federate with them.

A major company seeing the competitive advantage of joining the fediverse is a great development. I don't expect Meta to act in good faith, but it's an accomplishment nonetheless.

Corporations already joined the federated internet when they adopted the web.

Even if they wanted to, they can't take over the entire fediverse, that's the point.

Screw meta.

Makes no difference to me. Those who believe they have privacy just because Meta and others don't yet have their own instance are mistaken.