this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
792 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37603 readers
262 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I assumed over the years that users count would have been evaporated, so do we have current user counts for it?
Why would you assume that? I think Facebook has reported a loss of users maybe one quarter, ever? They're flirting with 3bn these days, as far as I can tell.
Just that I don't bother to care about them for years until now that they are trying to mess with Fediverse.
Well, like we've said elsewhere in this, they are orders of magnitude larger than the fediverse. Absorbing users or data is almost certainly not their motivation here.
It seems like a big commitment to federate, so one have to ask what really their motivation. I don't see anything else than just tapping into user pool and trying to ride the wave. Do you have other ideas?
If they wanted to tap into a big user pool they'd link it to Instagram, instead, which has about 2bn MAUs, as opposed to somewhere between 9 and 12 million.
The obvious reasoning for moving to a federated solution would be Meta thinking that it's a cool business opportunity to eventually link all the social media users they ALREADY have. Remember, they own Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram and Oculus, and at the moment none of them talk to each other, beyond them forcing Oculus users to have a Facebook login, which most of them dislike.
Besides that, BlueSky promotes itself as a separate federated service, which I'm assuming is something they'd like to match if they could when launching their own Twitter alternative.
ActivityPub provides a ready-made path to both of those things they can just... plug into without having to develop it from the ground up, like BlueSky is doing. One has to imagine that the dozen or so million people already using the tech are barely a speedbump along the way, wether they choose to stay linked up to Meta's billions of users or not. Ultimately, open source is open source and Meta can still use the tech to power their Twitter clone and eventually plug it into Instagram and add two billion people to their userbase overnight.