“The one feature that Facebook lacks is the ability to give its users autonomy.
Social media apps like Mastodon do not have a parent company operating them.
P92 Skirts the Fediverse
Twitter is on its way out.
Urupong / Getty Images
This is fundamentally different from services like Twitter and Facebook.
These are monolithic structures where everything happens inside a walled garden.
At the same time, Meta is under ever-increasing government scrutiny for its practices.
Maskot / Getty Images
By adopting the federated model, it might avoid the regulation it fears.
And for Facebook and Instagram users, it removes the biggest barriers to entering that fediverse.
But this is also the biggest danger for the existing fediverse.
It was how it took over the fledgling web client market, for example.
In the case of Meta and the fediverse, it would work like this.
Meta would embrace, say, Mastodon and instantly become the world’s biggest Mastodon server.
theResearch Fairy, the creator and administrator of thescholar.socialMastodon instance,said on Mastodon.
The Best Defense
But it might not be so easy.
First, a Mastodon instance can block any other instance.
Even an extensively-blocked Meta-owned Mastodon instance could be enough to finish off Twitter.
