Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ What should CoSocial do about Meta?

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

This is a discussion thread on CoSocial News (running on Lemmy, which can be thought of as a federated version of Reddit). The topic concerns what Facebook (ie., Meta) is planning to do to join the network of federated sites on ActivityPub (the decentralized network Mastodon and Lemmy are a part of). I would say the effect will be similar to what happened when users of the closed America Online (AOL) service joined the internet for the first time - a flood of new users with no real understand on what they've joined, why it's different from AOL, and what strange terms like 'website' mean. It's tricky. Do existing instances (like, say CoSocial News) federate with Meta - that is, do they allow interoperability between their site and Facebook's? Will other federated sites (like, say, Mastodon.social) block them if they do? What happens when WordPress and Tumblr and most other sites (but not sites like Reddit and Twitter) join the fediverse? Mastodon.social would go from being the largest instance in the fediverse to a tiny fraction of a percent of the fediverse. But wouldn't it be nice to finally have open social networks?

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Apr 27, 2024 7:39 p.m.

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