Since news leaked out 2 days ago that Facebook has approached Mastodon developers and admins - requiring non-disclosure agreements first - the whole microverse (i.e. mastodon / pleroma etc, the micro-blogging part of fedi) has been talking about nothing but that and Facebook’s imminent entry into the fediverse with an as yet not clearly defined entity called Barcelona or p92. This woud be very roughly comparable to Reddit saying they are going to federate with lemmy.
Yet here on lemmy I could only find a relatively small discussion.
https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/62958
Did the lemmyverse not know or just not care that much?
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.
Because they depend on it. The whole internet runs almost exclusively on Linux. To replace it would cost so much more money than just paying to the foundation to sit at the table and at least get a word in decisions. Trust me, Microsoft tried very hard, and burned billions of dollars, never got anywhere near to threatening Linux’s supremacy.
They are also the biggest contributors to linux projects such as io-uring, btrfs, rpm’s, and more. They don’t depend on it, they are part of it.
Both things are true at the same time. GNU/Linux existed for decades before Fuckerberg squirted Facebook out of his rear end. They’re a part of it, because they depend on it. There’s no alternative.
Agreed.