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?
There is a risk that they start going the path of Microsoft’s “Embrace, extend, extinguish”. Although they probably wouldn’t call an isolated instance “Lemmy”, they could start as being federated. It might not even be obvious that it’s run by Facebook.
But once they have a stranglehold on users/communities, they can pitch themselves as the “most complete” portal to Lemmy. Even if they completely defederate, they would have the instance people want to be on
People are wayyyyy underestimating what a market cap the size of meta can buy you. Mainly, it can buy any feasible competitor or threat to your perpetual domination. Then you simply eat them.
It’s not that much different than how meta et al were trying to get tiktok banned on the guise of “security” when really they just didn’t want to have to compete with them. The arguments will look a little different, but the strategy is the same