Is there any way the Fediverse can collaborate to stop their takeover?
There is a movement to get Fediverse instances to agree to block Meta. I guess if everyone did this, the Fediverse would continue on and Meta would probably be fine building their own platform.
But Meta has something the rest of the Fediverse doesn't have: money. They can simply pay some carefully chosen instances to Fedirate with them (which might be what the secret conversations are about).
There will also likely be a bit of a fight between instances that do or don't Federate with Meta, some thinking it's good because of the new userbase and some thinking it's bad because of the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish thing. That alone will probably cause damage as well, possibly splitting the already small userbase into two factions.
Meta is making a twitter/mastodon-like site, so Lemmy might get to have a wait and see approach, but if Meta start changing (Extending) the ActivityPub protocol then the dozens of different platforms on the Fediverse will all have to decide whether to change too or no longer be able to Federate with anyone who does change.
One of the benefits of Facebook Federating with Mastodon is the users. Building a new platform is hard but if on day 1 you can already follow millions of others then this helps. But after a month thay probably won't be very important, so it will be interesting to see what they do next.
Sure! I will try to keep it simple and not too long so I'll cover some of the main stuff without too much detail.
Open: the Fediverse is open, it's software is open source (the code is available for anyone to copy and improve on, or contribute changes back to the main software code), and any Meta platform will be proprietary (closed source). We don't know what the code is behind Facebook and they don't want us to know. The openness of the Fediverse is probably the core reason people are angry about NDAs and such.
Privacy: there are certainly privacy issues, but as an individual user this should be pretty much a non-issue if you don't follow any Meta communities and don't use a Meta account. Remember that for almost all Fediverse platforms, posts are public anyway.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: this phrase was coined during an anti-trust case with Microsoft in the 90s, there's a wikipedia page about it. The important bit is this:
The strategy's three phases are:
Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the "simple" standard.
Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
In our context, Meta is working on step 1, developing a platform compatible with the fediverse. People worry that steps 2 and 3 will come next, basically killing the Fediverse.
Servers are independent. You can only create the same username if it's not already taken. dave@gmail.com and dave@hotmail.com are the same username but different servers. You don't get dave@gmail.com reserved just because you have dave@hotmail.com, but if it's available you can register both.
Is there a way to have that account scrape whatever data you want to back up, saved posts etc from your ‘ghost account’ or your original account on the other server?
Lemmy is pretty young and there aren't a lot of tools. Most likely in future there will be an ability to transfer you account to another server, notifying other instances of the change. But this would require the home server to be available for approving the transfer otherwise you would have people stealing other people's accounts.
Mastodon (a twitter-like federated site) has an option to migrate an account, but as I understand it, that's more about moving your followers to your new account. I don't think the posts move. This page claims there it's a technical reason so perhaps we wouldn't have that on Lemmy either - but Mastodon does re-direct accounts, so perhaps on Lemmy in the future your posts might still point to the old user but if someone clicks on it then it will take them to your new account.
None of this is sorted yet so ideas will probably change over time.
Sorry if I get a bit technical but I'll try to explain my understanding.
Lemmy.nz has it's own communities. When someone subscribes to a community on another instance (say, !asklemmy) , the posts and community details are copied to a local version on the server. When someone from Lemmy.nz posts to the community, it goes into our local version. The server then behind the scenes is trying to keep our version in sync with the "real" one on lemmy.ml. Lemmy.ml is sending new posts and comments to lemmy.nz, and lemmy.nz is sending posts made by lemmy.nz members back to lemmy.ml, who then send them out to other servers.
If lemmy.ml suddenly disappeared, we would continue to be able to post to the community, add comments, etc, but sending those posts to other servers wouldn't work. lemmy.ml is responsible for sending the posts to your server at lemmy.world, and so you would not see the posts made by lemmy.nz users that are no longer able to federate - however, you could still read the community as it was at the time federation stopped and with the addition of anything anyone on your own instance has added.
One exception is media. Lemmy currently does not federate media, so if someone posts a picture to a community on lemmy.ml (where the picture is uploaded to lemmy.ml), then lemmy.ml goes offline, no one will be able to see the picture (but they will still see the post).
In terms of accounts, you will lose your account. However, accounts are also federated as remote users, so when a lemmy.world user like yourself posts to lemmy.nz, your account is also copied here. Lemmy.nz users can view the account, see that you made the comment, etc. However, you cannot log in to your account and make new posts from a different server - it's a sort of ghost account.
So long story short, you lose access to your account and any images but the posts and comments are accessible from other servers so long as they were federated with your instance prior to it shutting down. If a new instance comes online, it will not be able to get posts from a community on an instance that is no longer online.