social.wildeboer.net is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
Mastodon instance for people with Wildeboer as their last name

Server stats:

2
active users

Facebook/Meta starts talking about the "Extend" phase of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish as predicted:

"“You could imagine an extension to the protocol eventually — of saying like, ‘I want to support micropayments,’ or … like, ‘hey, feel free to show me ads, if that supports you.’ Kind of like a way for you to self-label or self-opt-in. That would be great,”

techcrunch.com/2024/04/25/why-

TechCrunch · Why Meta is looking to the fediverse as the future for social media | TechCrunchMeta's move into the open social web, also known as the fediverse, is puzzling. Does the Facebook owner see open protocols as the future? Will it embrace

(And this will in turn enable more divide and conquer. Also part of the usual strategy to break a movement that is perceived as a possible threat by big organisations)

Jan Wildeboer 😷:krulorange:

"It's not our evil plan, you people are already doing it" is the typical argument for Divide and Conquer. Unsurprisingly they bring that argument too:

"For instance, fediverse advocate and co-editor of ActivityPub Evan Prodromou @evan created a paid Mastodon account (@evanplus) that users could subscribe to for $5 per month to gain access. If he’s on board with paid content, surely others would follow."

(the irony being of course that Evan did this with standard ActivityPub, no changes needed)

I have raised the alarm bell already several years ago. Explained how the (at that time mostly dormant) Working Group at the W3C that is responsible for must be reinvigorated (that happened) and must became a loud defender of the (that didn't happen) or else we risk losing our ecosystem to fragmentation and infighting.

And that infighting is already visible in the comments. Divide and conquer always works and costs close to nothing. Unfortunately.