Corporations don’t just sit out on new technologies, and no matter how hard you try you can’t force them to. Defederating from Meta’s new project preemptively is naive, and will not do much of anything.
Protocols are going to be adopted by corporations, whether we like it or not. SMTP, LDAP, HTTP, IP and 802.11 are all examples of that. If it ends up that meta is able to destroy the fediverse simply by joining it, that is a design flaw on OUR end. Something would then clearly need to be different in order to prevent future abuse of the protocol.
FOSS is propped up by corporations. By for profit corporations. If you want to stop those corporations from killing projects, you put safety guards up to make sure that doesn’t happen. You don’t just shut them out and put your head in the sand.
Safety guards like what, do you have some ideas or examples?
I like the concept of copyleft, which has prevented a lot of EEE. As for protocols, the answer is a little more complex. Protocols can’t really be copyrighted, so it’s essentially going to be what’s the easiest to implement, who is using it and what utility it provides.
There have always been competing protocols, and also closed vs open protocols. Most of the time the protocols that win are the open ones, and the trend is that they provide a lot of utility and is easily used by anyone. In my view, the question it will come down to will be: is having a decentralized social network going to provide more utility for the big players, or is the concept doomed because centralization will always provide the biggest monetary incentive?
Something that gives me hope is that social media is not a profitable business venture. This could mean that Meta is exploring the fediverse because it sees something useful in it that doesn’t conflict with their business interests, but in fact supports it. The biggest tell to see if this will work out is if other companies start to adopt the protocol, at which point the safety guard is “Well, a lot of big players are using it and if I break activitypub support with them that’s bad for business.”.