So, they’re spiking on it, which isn’t particularly surprising at this stage. In fact they have to since they’re a public company, they can’t make announcements that they’re spending R&D on something, and not spend it, that would be SEC fraud. I’m still not buying that it’s in their interest enough that they would actually put it out there. This feels like such a heavy engineering lift, for little upside besides the compelling differentiation story to tell.
Also, based on their communications so far, they mean to federate with Mastodon, but they don’t care much about Lemmy. Which makes sense, their shareholders have massively heard of Mastodon, but not Lemmy. Even if they release something, I bet it will be federation with some specific Mastodon servers that they know will treat them well.
Maybe I’m wrong, that’s completely possible. If they start federating with Lemmy.world, I’m squarely in the “then we should defederate now” camp. But at this point this feels like so much hot air and speculation, that I’m not even sure why it’s being talked about so much.