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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • I honestly don’t think Meta even cares about the Fediverse as we know it. Mastodon barely cracked 2.5m active monthly users in late 2022/early 2023, and the Fediverse user counts had been dropping until the Reddit debacle. There’s no way they are agile enough to push this out the door in response to what happened in June, and this is a lot of effort to kill something already in decline with only 0.01% your active monthly user base.

    Even so, what do they gain by killing Mastodon? Paying for the dev work and the server cost to host their own instance? All the data on the Fediverse that they’d want to sell is publicly accessible anyway; they could grab/sell it all without going through this effort. I think they see long term value in the ActivityPub protocol, and they are positioning themselves to get ahead of any other major corporate ActivityPub-based platform.

    I suspect the intention is that if another major platform appears (BlueSky, anyone?) that it will pressure them to also implement ActivityPub, thereby increasing the pool of data on the Fediverse and letting Meta analyze and sell it too.