• MudMan@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 year ago

    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.

      • MudMan@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • TheTrueLinuxDev@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          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?

          • MudMan@kbin.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            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 roadbump 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.