@ernie@writing.exchange @fiercemilder@mastodon.ie so, let’s say this plays out as described (which isn’t entirely far-fetched, I think).
What’s to stop the existing fediverse software makers and standards people from… just not going along with Google Toot™? Fine, shove it down every Gmail user’s throat, there’ll be an influx of a smattering of folks (not billions, if the general Gmail populace had that kind of desire, G+ would’ve still been alive and a lot bigger today), and Google might at some point diverge from the standards.
So? They’ll have their own, somewhat (and maybe increasingly) incompatible island, which… doesn’t bother us? And then a year later, they’ll add SMS to it and kill it a couple of months later, because Google.
I can’t really think of a platform or standard that Google really managed to fuck up for everyone.
Looking at different parts of the FAANG crew, I’m not sure if they’re going to go for it, either. Microsoft? They aren’t in the social game, haven’t been since the MSN days. Apple? Adopting a standard they haven’t invented or, alternatively, set on for half a decade? Nah. Facebook? Too busy with inventing legs. Amazon? Not sure, really, how could they extract money from a social network? It’s not shopping or cloud services. (Well, actually, Amazon might profit from all of it because everybody is going to need compute to run those servers on).
Also, I like to think that people are, slowly, catching on. The big privacy-invading days are coming to an end, the EU is putting their foot down, the US is probably going to follow it at least partly.
Of course, I could be wildly off the mark. That still has me kind of wondering how the EEE would work for a platform (or a group of platforms) that are open and decentralized by design. Worst case, they might siphon off a group of people, but that’s not really a danger to the fediverse as such.
