Was the lemmyverse/threadiverse aware that Mastodon has been convulsed for the past 2 days?

I think meta is deliberately trying to fly under the radar until it too late. Several fedi communities have signed a 'pledge' saying they will actively block meta fedi content from their servers. (Similar to what most are already doing with Truth Social which is just another mastodon instance).
- Very interesting. I had no idea truth social used ActivityPub.
- Truth.social was actually never part of the Fediverse. It does use AcitivtyPub, but it doesn't federate with other instances: https://pocketnow.com/trump-truth-social-network-removes-most-freedom-friendly-features-fediverse/
  
  I'll be honest, part of the reason I didn't come to the Fediverse earlier was I knew that Truth Social was "on" Mastodon. That discouraged me from investigating anything about it. When Reddit forced my hand and I looked into it further, I realized that avoiding the whole space because Truth Social ran on it was as absurd as avoiding the Internet because Fox News has a website.

Btw for those curious, Meta/FB approaching Mastodon admins is related to their in-development Project92/Threads possible Twitter-successor/competitor.
As it says at the start of the article, the intent is integrate ActivityPub in it in some way. Concerns are being raised for a variety of understandable possibilities some have mentioned here, or sort of alluded to, such as the corporate practice of Embracing, Extending, and Extinguishing. An idea being that Facebook may only be adopting ActivityPub to in some way screw everyone else using it over.
There's also the possibilities of questionable FB moderation practices permitting a flooding of linked instances with unmoderated FB garbage, scraping data (but since most of the fediverse stuff is public they...Don't really need their own public app to do that), and so on.
- Upvoted for mentioning EEE. Meta has been really active in facilitating progress in the opensource community lately with their work on LLAMA, so I'm not surprised to hear they are involved elsewhere.
  
  Like much of big tech, they've been open sourcing software for years and EEE is a Microsoft playbook that was mainly used to target competitors, not open source software, from before Facebook even existed. People are parroting it because it's a nice sounding alliteration, but it's a false equivalence that does not apply because we can fork lemmy at any time.

Eh, I use Mastodon and had no idea. I think it only matters to fediverse supporters who care about how it works. Not dismissing their concerns, Facebook is verifiably harmful to society and democracy, but for the average user this is not even on their radar.
I just opened Icecubes and scrolled the Federated timeline for a while. Not a mention of Facebook or Meta so far as this is concerned.
- It's a sexy iOS client for Mastodon. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ice-cubes-for-mastodon/id6444915884

I just truly don't give a shit about Twitter and Twitter-like sites.
- I just don't think I fully understand them. I signed up on like 2013, but the UI kinda confused me and I realized I prefer aggregation better.

I have no desire to interact with Facebook via Lemmy. Fuck that idea. And I think it's shady that there's Mastodon admins having secret meetings with Fuckerberg and his cronies and keeping the details secret. I think it's even worse to see Mastodon servers defederating with other servers just because their admins are critical of Meta. I feel bad for all the users who fled to Mastodon just to get away from Big Corporate Social Media just to be shushed and have their concerns handwaved by their Admin who seems bizarrely starstruck. It all leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
- To give them the benefit of the doubt, having to sign an NDA doesn't mean they actually get into bed with Meta.
  If you catch me completely off-guard, or for example 10 minutes ago when I started reading the thread, I definitely would give a hot-headed "hell no, fuck you Fuckerberg" response to any approach from Meta, but now that I've had the time to calmly think and see other people's responses I have a better idea (which follows the benefit of the doubt train of though I mentioned).
  Sure, the NDA ties your hands, but only until Meta makes the stuff they are scheming public. If federation is part of it, once they federate it would become public knowledge anyway. I'll admit it's not a large group of people who would be signing the NDA and sitting down with Meta, but that group of people now has advanced warning of anything Meta is planning and they can begin to counter plan, which is better than being caught totally off guard when Fuckerberg exposes himself.
  If they do lie in bed (and federate) with Meta rather than use it as an opportunity to gain Intel on Meta's horrid schemes, then sure, they will have chosen that side. If they just take Meta's money and ultimately it helps the fediverse, or just use it to gain Intel, then no harm, no foul?
- I think there's probably a reasonable explanation for this. The entire idea of Mastodon was built around getting away from companies like Meta. The admins arent going to just do a 180 on that.
  It's more likely that Meta wants to do a similar thing as Truth Social and they are doing some consultation work. It would be good money and I don't blame them for taking it.
  
  I hope this is the case and they don't try to federate
- Now that I think about it, Zuck does seem to have that effect on people. Does he actually have a mind-washing beam?
  
  It‘s called money.

On the one hand, embrace-extend-extinguish is a classic playbook for big evil companies.
Facebook runs a version of mastodon or lemmy or whatever that is actually good
People get on board because it's usable and ostensibly open
Facebook invents features that, sadly, are not possible with ActivityPub (actual private messages come to mind)
On the other hand, it remains to be seen if anyone takes Meta up on a new offering. I'd have complete faith in the future of the open Internet if it was Google trying this.

I've heard some rumours but I'm not worried.They can create an instance if they want, by fediverse nature if they do something nasty others would be able to defederste from them.

I haven’t really heard that much about this. But I am very skeptical of any claims that Facebook is actually going to fedderate in good faith.
Obviously, it’ll be up to the administrators of the different instances whether to federate or not. So we’ll see
I also wonder how big the overlap is between people who would use a federated platform and those who would willingly use anything made by Facebook.
With that said, I’ll never say never, but I find the likelihood of this taking off to be slim to none
- I also wonder how big the overlap is between people who would use a federated platform and those who would willingly use anything made by Facebook.
  It doesn't have to overlap if they bake it into their existing website. A huge portion of humanity has a Facebook account, even if they don't use it. They're baking in as much as they can with Marketplace taking over Craigslist's former space, trying to capture VR with your Facebook account, and now they want to take over Twitter's space. And I'm not saying the backend work wouldn't be huge, but their whole "posting stuff to people who follow you" schtick fits perfectly with the Fediverse. There's nothing stopping them from just federating everything.
  
  Fair, however I’m still VERY skeptical of them federating in good faith

Given the "anyone can join in" nature of the fediverse, something like this was inevitable. I expected it to be at least be another couple of years, though.
There is potential good for this- a lot more developer resources going into this technology. And being open source software, there's a lot of ways we can potentially mitigate any damage if we have to. But... there's definitely a lot of ways this can go poorly as well.

I've heard something about it, but I guess Lemmies have been too busy with Reddit and just building up Lemmy communities, so this flew under the radar.
And honestly yea, why should we care? If they wanna make an instance, nobody is stopping them, but I hope nobody will want to federate with them. We've had enough of corporate socials lately.
- The shocking news this week was that a couple of admins of large Mastodon instances were talking with Meta (under NDA's!), so it seems your hope (and mine) will be in vain.
  
  It's really going to be up to the users to push back should the admins get a payout to do something not in the communities interest.
  Everyone is going to have to remain nimble and not rely on finding a permanent server until corporations get the message that this is a space that cannot be monetized in a capitalist way.

If it ends up bad for the overall environment of the fediverse, they'll just get defederated. A lot of the folks on Mastadon are getting worked up because the identity of this corner of the internet is decidedly anti-corporate. The thing is, it's just a few clicks for any instance-owner to completely isolate that project.
It could be a big deal (initially), or it could be a giant nothingburger. Or it could be a big deal that eventually turns into a nothingburger. Too soon to say, and way too soon to throw a fit over.

My [paranoid] take: its vaporware designed to distract from the reddit fiasco, with plans fo mr meta to later absorb reddit instead of a reddit IPO. Reddit users are very different than Twitter users; the mass exodus didn’t happfrom Twitter to Mastodon, but looks very promising from reddit to lemmy/kbin. And it takes only one social media giant to crumble for the rest to follow. Once people are on Fediverse there is no going back
- I think it has absolutely nothing to do with Reddit and everything to do with Twitter.
  I think they scrambled to get something up and running quickly so they could get the wave of disgruntled Twitter users and jumpstart a new social media for them, and the only feasible option in 5 months was to use Mastodon/Activitypub to get there.
  It will be interesting to see how much they give back to the community and if they federate.

It's amazing seeing people who, after everything destructive action taken by these large corporations in these settings, still think maybe this time will magically be different and look to a corporation like it's their potential dad who they can't possibly survive let alone thrive without.
- Even in here some are like "but we need the corporations".
  I certainly don‘t and I‘m fully prepared to go to an instance which stands with me on this. Defederation from all big corporations (small ones are probably impossible to weed out and hopefully less dangerous but should be kept an eye on). If that makes my version of the fediverse smaller, so be it, I like small communities anyway.
  They infiltrate these spaces, they take over and "make it better" to lure people, then they centralise and then when people become dependent they enshittify it to sell us, sell our data, sell anything we say and also sell shit to us which we don’t need. All the while condescendingly applying their "codes of conduct" on us to be allowed the privilege to make them money.
  I repeat: I don‘t need them. I don‘t want them.
  If the majority accept this and even those small communities fold and die too, this will be the last time for me. I‘m just gonna live like a monk in some Austrian forest without internet. All I ever wanted is to talk to some cool people around the world about life and stuff I like.
- 💀

Honestly, a lot of people might disagree but, corporate involvement is essential to FOSS projects surviving. The biggest FOSS project on the planet, Linux, is literally propped up by the biggest corporations on the planet.
The only potential issue I see here is maybe Meta forks ActivityPub and it becomes a "Meta Project" or some other fuckery. Outside of that I don't see any major issues with it. If we want ActivityPub to become something greater, we're going to need corporations on board. We have strong protections in place right now with a lot of the stuff that's being used being under strong copyleft licenses, and decentralization by nature is going to allow us to opt out of a lot of the ads and tracking that takes place by being forced to use an official app.
- Linux is propped up by the corps that would lose if Linux went away. Not by Zuckerberg.
  
  Here are the Linux foundation members.
  https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
  Meta and Microsoft are among the Platinum members in the Linux foundation. Basically a lot of international mega corporations are sponsors of Linux.

I heard Facebook was going to make something "built on Mastodon," but I didn't think federation was on the table too. I would think a company wouldn't want open federation, that sounds like a content moderation nightmare.
Likewise, if I ran a Mastodon server, I'd block them immediately. I don't use Facebook for a reason, and anyone who would just blindly let Facebook scoop up their community data is part of the problem.
- I posted this on Mastodon, but I completely disagree with the idea of defederating from Meta instances on principal for the same reason I don't want my Fastmail account to stop interacting with Gmail accounts just because I feel Google is too corporate. That defeats the entire purpose of open standards and federated content. I should be able to choose to personally block content from Meta instances if I want to, but it's to the detriment of the community to fracture the Fediverse just because it's starting to grow large enough to attract attention from one of the big tech companies.
  The reality is, a federated Meta service would at least initially grow the idea of federated social media as a whole, and likely drive traffic to Kbin/Lemmy/Mastodon from people who want to get off of the Meta platforms, but don't want to cut contact with their friends/coworkers/enemies entirely. While I probably wouldn't make an account, I'd be interested in at least being able to follow a few of my friends who I actually have interest in seeing updates from via my Masto/Kbin accounts.
  And I'm aware of the embrace/extend/extinguish paradigm, but premature defederation isn't the answer there either.
  I'm an advocate for federated content for convenience, not on principal alone.
  
  I think comparing it with E-Mail is a bit naive. It a different history. Accepting Meta basically means making it the main instance of the fediverse. The main content and users will be over there. There will be policies what is allowed and not allowed on the main instance and who can federate with it. With new additions of features and policies the federation of will slowly become meaningless. In the end it will be a similar situation like with Reddit. Where Meta is Reddit in this scenario and the other instances are the third party clients. Yes they will still be able to communicate with each other. But in the grand scheme of things the rest of the network will be irrelevant.
  There already is a tendency to flock to the largest instances. Meta can provide a larger instance than all current instances combined and will have better UX.
  This is a social / business problem. Not a technical one about open protocols. Meta has shown in the past that they might have good developers and open source a ton of stuff. But their business side of things is borderline evil.