They will be able to dictate how mastodon works of they become larger than the rest of the instances. Their stake in the network will make them more powerful than all the other instances combined.

[–] topinambour_rex@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They will be able to dictate how mastodon works

How they will do that ? How are they going to dictate the programmers of Mastodon/Lemmy ?

[–] daBeans@sh.itjust.works 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

There's a concept called Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (seemingly coined, in that form, in a Microsoft antitrust lawsuit). Here's the Wikipedia page on it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

As I understand, people argue that Facebook/Meta, via Threads, will use this strategy in the long-term to either kill, or make effecitvely obsolete, the open technology behind Mastodon. If not that, then they could easily make the federation part of Threads buggy & unreliable, souring their users' opinions on the "fediverse".

They don't need to control anyone; they only need to host a majority of the userbase (by being the most popular federated site). And they're not starting from a user count of 1 or 10, unlike a lot of Mastodon sites.

Obviously, Mastodon & Lemmy, and the sites that run them, can keep chugging along just fine, but it's argued that if Meta makes their federation implementation sub-par (or otherwise sabotages it), it'll hurt the user-base growth of sites that use these projects (as people will see begin to see it as unreliable or what-not).

Is it as doom and gloom as people make it seem? Idk, I haven't had time to care.