How do we feel about Meta joining the Fediverse?
Personally, I want nothing to do with them and I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I moved to the Fediverse to get away from all these corpos.
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Comments177View original on lemmy.ml
Judging from their past and all the bad actions they have done in the past, bad for democracy, privacy, minorities and marginalised people and how openly they have a far/extreme-right bias. Well I feel extremely negative about them joining in. They were also part of destruction of another open/federated protocol in the past: they played big part in destroying XMPP/Jabber messaging. So I am afraid they will do their usual embrace, extend, and extinguish thing and their surveillance capitalist thing and yeah. no good. Best to block their instances outright.
I was going to say, while we can't do much about them adopting an open protocol, please defederate with them
Yeah, I was thinking of Jabber as well, when I heard this. For a brief period everything was perfect. Facebook and Google were both using Jabber. And even WhatsApp was using it, I think. So if you had an account somewhere you could actually chat with all your friends, totally unimpeded.
EU should hurry up with their federation laws.
What do you mean?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/eu-digital-markets-acts-interoperability-rule-addresses-important-need-raises
Holy shit! Had no idea! Thanks, mate.
Common EU W
The EU really are the protectors of the free and open internet. Given the Republicans would kill any attempts to pass any regulations here in the States, we're basically reliant on the EU to save us. So thanks, guys :)
They've been high on Reaganomics for decades and refuse to accept that legislating the private sector was critical to keep them from ruining everything.
Except for that one time
I like the EU as much as the next guy, but you can't tell the whole story without mentioning this disaster.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/24/dma-political-agreement/
The DMA's Article on interoperability is actually already in force, as far as I can tell. Will be interesting to see when / what will happen in practice.
Apple was also federated with iChat/iMessage. I believe iMessage still to this day is XMPP based.
you can still use XMPP. i use it, my family uses it.
hate facebook all you want (i certainly do) but dont act like normies would be living in a federated utopia without them. theyd be on whatever is closed source with the most number of people and the most advertising dollars behind it and the simplest user experience. normies like easy, and its hard to blame them.
Yes and no. Normies use federated systems too: Websites and email.
true. but don't forget that when these things were new, they came kicking and screaming. think of how many people retired during the PC/internet boom just so they wouldn't have to deal with it all at work. the entire world changed and made websites/email a necessity to exist and survive. i don't really see a minor flavor of tech like microblogging following that path. people will have an option between "easy and closed source" and "mildly just a little technical but with freedom" and will choose to go with whatever is easy.
Ack. I just said almost the same thing before I read your comment.
They are free to set up an instance. Not sure who would federate with them.
Bribes
Most Based answer.
FYI: There is already a pact among some Fediverse operators to block any instance controlled by Meta.
Is that necessary though? I feel like we should let them join. If they do something malicious, then we can block them. IMO, it doesn't make sense to just preemptively block them for no real reason.
It is wholly necessary. They will start massive data mining operations if they join, harming users of all instances.
Data mining can happen without any of that, everything you post in the fediverse is literally available for anyone to see. Realistically, the most harm they can do is build controlled communities that grow so huge that they drown out all of the fediverse's open communities.
Your most harm scenario is exactly what they want to do.
Yeah, it is. And I'm not saying that's not a valid reason to resist companies in the fediverse, it totally is. I'm just saying the privacy concerns everyone is mentioning don't really make sense, anything they could get, everyone already has
Yeah I kind of roll my eyes about it too. "Things you delete are there forever" - that's literally how the internet has always worked. It's like when people found out their snap chats and Instagram stories could be seen by anyone who worked at the companies...like fucking obviously, they DEVELOPED the app and host all the content?!
Look at what happened with Google Chrome and browser standards. We don't want a company that dominates the landscape changing the rules in their favour.
They've demontrated their evil nature in the past, promoting divisive and inciteful material and anything to drive engagement for the sake of advertiser dollars. I don't think we need to wait for them to do it again in the Fediverse. Better to head that shit off right up front.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft did it before, we shouldn't let Meta do it now.
They will not do anything overtly malicious. But, in 5-10 years the entire fediverse will be under their control:
First, they will be early adopters, they will provide insane amounts of funds to improve the platform and ecosystem.
As the platform improves and the user base grows, they'll start pushing for additional features to the standard under the guise of improvements. Even if the standard doesn't accept the changes, if the biggest platform does, it becomes the defacto standard.
New features will be introduced faster than anyone else can develop them, essentially shutting competitors down. They will also start offering proprietary services to form an ecosystem under their control.
Once they control the pie, they'll make it increasingly difficult for small instances to operate via things like security updates and increasing the prices of their now essential services. Of course, this won't affect them.
At this point, the decentralized, free, and open fediverse will effectively be fully under the control of Meta.
This is not speculation. This happened with chrome and web browsers. This is happening with GitHub/VSCode and Microsoft. This is how tech giants expand.
Even if they were somehow not evil, the sheer volume would technologically destroy any instance that tried to federate with them.
I've been wondering about how that could work as a denial of service... Meta-scale would work, for sure
My feeling about Meta joining the Fediverse is: 🚨DANGER!🚨
They will datamine all federated users They will set up a CDN for uploads on their platform that will track you like v.meta.com or i.meta.com.
They will probably train LLMs off the data. They will sell the data to advertisers or data brokers. They will most likely have ads or pay to boost.
They will diverge from the standard once they have the majority of users like google does with chrome and the web.
Everyone is already datamining the fediverse. That's the whole point of it, all the data is public.
I would hope their instance would get pretty immediately defederated. If not, it's worth moving to an instance that doesn't federate with them.
This is the only thing they couldn't already do. They've probably already been datamining Fediverse users. No need to set up an instance for that.
I agree with the v.meta.com and i.meta.com. We'll have to establish some good alternatives by then so people don't use them just because they work so well.
To me it sounds like they are trying to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the fediverse. I wouldn't doubt if at first they adopted it with all the standards then started doing proprietary crap
"Little by little, a little becomes a lot."
They'd start with little proprietary things here, then there, and before we know it the Federation wouldn't be the same Federation we're enjoying today.
The same thing happened with the Web since the 90s and 00s. Mark my words...
They see the fediverse trend gain9ng steam with the rise of Mastodon and go "Oh sheit we need to be on that for $$$". Proceed to embrace, extend, enshittify, and extinguish. Its nothing but Zuckerberg's gasping breaths to try and stay relevant as his company begins the very slow, but inevitable, backslide into technological irrelevance.
I will be leaving and/or blocking any instance that chooses to federate with anything related to Meta. They are antithetical to the entire foundation of the metaverse and they ruin everything they touch.
I hate the fact that for a large number of people, this will be how they will be introduced to the fediverse and their view of it will be tainted by Meta. I also dread seeing Meta spam in my federated timeline. And I also fear Meta building its own proprietary features on top of the ActivityPub protocol, making the content generated with them incompatible with independent clients, and allowing Zuck to spread his monopoly to the fediverse as well.
I'm trying to get away from Facebook and meta. I'd rather they weren't remotely near me at all
Exactly my thoughts, I don’t trust meta or zucky’s leadership, their motives will always be profit over everything else
I think the answer to this would be to block any instances they create.
I guess I'll just go back to reading books and watching movies full time.
Fuck all of those tech giants.
It'll be near impossible for them to destroy the fediverse thankfully
You could watch Foundation on Apple+...oh..
Yarr
Facebook et al has had a horrible track record of creating a new app/service and getting people on board. Their 3 successes are Facebook, Whatsapp (bought), and IG (bought). Every time they've launched an app outside of these, they failed (IGTV anyone?).
The Fediverse is open.
They can create Threads on activity pub and hope that they can create a server that competes with Twitter. Go for it, who cares. You can choose to follow people there or not, or join or not, or be on a server that defederates from it or not.
That's the beauty of it.
Meta's userbase is diverse. It has good and bad players. No need to broadstrokes it. If people join the Fediverse via Threads, many will discover Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Calckey etc over time. Discovery & community!
So, like... in conclusion or whatever... everyone needs to chill. IMO.
Meta are doing WHAT‽
A federated reddit clone named threads.
Sounds like it is going to be more of a Twitter clone unless I read a shit article. It also sounds like they might not federate with mastodon or other instances to keep everyone in their meta ecosystem.
'What a lovely Nope you have going on there.'
https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/meta-explores-mastodon/
Wtf
I see.
fuck that noise, absolutely do not federate with them
People are being really hypocritical.
You want a free open source social network. But when people you dont like join it, you hate it. That is not how it works, its not how FREE in FOSS works.
Meta can join, they can do whatever they want. It literally the point of this social network. If you dont like it, then go to a social network that is not FOSS, but is heavily moderated, because that is what most of you really want.
"Freedom" can be used to justify lots of really bad stuff. Meta has too much money to be trusted, they WILL fuck the Fediverse up eventually for more profit on the first chance they get (and people with lots of money always get those chances).
And it's not just about morality and the fucked up stuff that's happened on Meta, Iike the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I stopped using Facebook years ago because of the low quality of the content being posted there. And last week I logged back in to sell some stuff and oh boy, the content managed to get even worse.
I don't want growth just for the sake of growth. We don't need big corporations getting involved.
I agree with you. But, then we should be honest about what we want. We want a social network that is heavily moderated against corporate interference, while still being open to everbody else.
Its a structure that is impossible to maintain. Its a dream.
This seems like a misunderstanding of FLOSS. "Free" doesn't mean that you're obligated to provide everyone a platform for whatever they want. Defederation is an appropriate tool for a wide range of conditions, including "the users do not want to be in a community with the users of this instance".
The vast majority of Mastodon servers defederated Gab a long time ago, as well as instances that, among other things, promoted lolicon or allowed targeted harassment on other fediverse users.
Fediverse instances can and should defederate any Meta server. That's because Meta joining the fediverse puts them in the position to establish a position similar to Google in browsers- i.e.: there's no longer meaningful competition or a meaningful counterpoint- anything Meta wants done to the fediverse happens and anything they don't want done doesn't happen.
I think he's saying that there's nothing wrong with Meta joining. You're completely correct in that we have the tools to hide their content if we want to. That's the beauty of this platform.
I'm also FREE to say fuck Meta, fuck Facebook, and all communities should defederate with anything corrupted by them
All instances should defederate with corporation instances ASAP
Give meta the boot
Just block them from federating and move on.
If Facebook behave and their instances have good moderation, they'll be successful. If they don't, they'll get defederated and turn into some niche twitter clone echo chamber like Truth Social.
Facebook is a company with great open-source tech contributions (React, GraphQL) but absolutely awful products (Literally every social media thing they've got their hands on), which is why they are desperately trying to turn their side project Oculus into their main product. And I think they, as the original "The Social Network" company, see the writing on the wall: that they either embrace federation and decentralization, or get swept away by it into the footnote of social media history.
Now, I don't think Facebook wants to JUST run an instance where they get to control everything. I think the most likely scenario is that Facebook will offer easy managed federated instance setup hosted on their own cloud servers for less tech inclined individuals and companies in the future, and they'll rebrand it as "the actual metaverse", which will finally end their tenure as an advertising company.
It's an easy fix. If an instance you're a part of federates with them then just move to a new instance.
Hopefully this will put instance blocking on the top of the list.
Fuuuuuck no! This isn't actually happening right? This is just an idea I hope?
It's the old Microsoft strategy again - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
They deserve a good boot up the arse before they put one up our's.
News story I looked up. Fuck Meta and all the other money-sucking bastards that want to commodify every breath I take.
https://fediversereport.com/meta-plans-on-joining-the-fediverse-the-responses/
Meta is more likely to pull people away from Twitter than Mastodon is, and having all of Twitter be run with ActivityPub / open to federation is a good thing.
Bad. I just feel bad.
I think they would take advantage of Fediverse and destroy it.
God fucking damn it. I wanted to get away from them.
Don't use any website made with reactJS then.
Corporations already joined the federated internet when they adopted the web.
Even if they wanted to, they can't take over the entire fediverse, that's the point.
That's what they said about the Web back in the 90s and early 00s. Back then we all said "companies can't take over the entire Web. If they tried something, anyone could just make their own site." But they didn't need to prevent others from making a competitor site; they just needed to make theirs take up a big enough piece of the pie. Now look at what at we have to deal with with the Web as it is today...
All they need is to make their own instance, and then get it big enough, and it'd be virtually no different than more traditional websites. Sure, anyone can make their own instances or communities, but without the hardware to prop up thousands to millions of users there's no way anyone could compete with a company-sponsored instance past a certain threshold of critical mass.
And they still have not taken over the web. There's plenty of places online that are not under corporate control, look at any piracy site for example, or even 4chan. People willingly choose to use corporate services, but those corporate services are not the only places to go.
Technically true, but the majority of people are not that technically savvy nor interested in seeking out comparatively obscure platforms. Most people on the Web go onto corporate platforms or corporate - sponsored platforms. That also means that even a lot of the people who would normally seek out more comparatively obscure or out-of-the-way platforms are forced by dint of practicality just to keep in contact with friends and family, a lá Facebook Messenger.
As I said, they don't need to take over the whole web to domimate the web, just a large enough piece of the pie. Sure, it may be only 99%, but practically speaking that 1% won't functionally exist for the vast majority of people, even to those who would otherwise seek it out.
I have to say, i don't like it, i mean i got here, because i didn't want to have anything to do anymore with them, but i guess if we are careful enough, they probably can't do to much to destroy our current fediverse.
It's hard for me to see anything good coming from this.
we shouldnt let them in. they would have done decentralized service years ago if there was money in it for them. They either want us to stop or try to seize control in only way that can -> by worming in.
We must have zero-tolerance for corporations or we might as well just give up.
As long as servers cost money to run, corporations will need to be involved.
At a fundamental level, it's either
a) run by donations as a non profit, but as we've seen from wikipedia it will be a constant struggle to have enough money to last indefinitely (especially since Reddit / kbin / lemmy cost a lot more to run than Wikipedia)
b) run by subscriptions, which will greatly limit growth, reach, search engine optimization, etc.
c) run by advertising in which case corporate ad networks (like the kind that Meta runs) will need to be involved or
d) have instances that are government run / paid for, but it would be difficult to accomplish on a global scale and may come with restrictions that not everyone is happy with
It sucks but those are pretty much the only four options for running a digital community that requires paid servers and hosting space. Either corporations or some large government organization are going to have to be involved.
About your first point, I've heard that Wikipedia is actually very wealthy and doesn't need the money. They essentially run a scam every year asking for more.
I don't understand why everyone freaks out that wikipedia tries to keep a reserve. Yes, they have enough money on hand to run for a few years... Is that really such a bad thing? Why does everyone think nonprofits should be scrimping by before they do their next donation campaign?
To me, keeping a reserve fund just seems like good money management, and I'd rather donate to an organization that manages their money well than one that doesn't. If there were problems with a large chunk of donations not going to wikipedia upkeep it would be different, but as far as I can tell all of the controversy is just over the fact that they have a reserve at all
The biggest problem is the fact they beg for donations and the wording makes it seem like they are about to shut down unless you donate right now. They are disingenuous.
No one said having reserve funds is bad, so please don't put words in my mouth. Just don't act like you're about to shut down Wikipedia to get more money when you literally have millions in reserve. It's scummy.
imagine if wikipedia actually shut down. I dont fault them any precaution as long as it doesnt cause actual harm. Though if they just keep doing that even though they have money for tens of years in reserve then that starts getting a bit suspicious.
A major company seeing the competitive advantage of joining the fediverse is a great development. I don't expect Meta to act in good faith, but it's an accomplishment nonetheless.
I feel like they'll just scrape it to feed their data driven ad machine. To them it's just a free open source of data to repackage and sell.
Random Facebook boomers and literal children joining reddit is what started the long and slow downfall of reddit. I assume it would work the same way with ActivityPub forums/blogs/whatever
Block them or I’m gone
Users can block entire instances/domains. No need to worry if your chosen instances is doing it for you.
keep corporations OUT
Meta is a corporation with a really horrible track record
and even if they didn't, it's still a corporation; it only cares for profit
I have very negative opinions on them joining
We would be opening the door to allow a large corporation to do what they've done with open source for a while. They'll privatize the public commons.
Our freedoms were taken away by proprietary software which is mostly coded by ourselves. For free. We spent our free time developing, debugging, testing software before handing them to corporations that we rever, hoping to maybe get a job offer or a small sponsorship from them. Without Non-copyleft Open Source, there would be no proprietary MacOS, OSX nor Android. There would be no Facebook, no Amazon. We created all the components of Frankenstein’s creature and handed them to the evil professor.
This article is actually pretty great.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html
And for emphasis:
That's a great piece - thanks!
I'd reaaally rather not have that happen.
They can fuck right off.
All they'll do is centralize the decentralized.
Nope. Just nope. It'll be the death of the Fediverse.
I mean everyone could just not federate with them, right?
Ideally
Embrace, extend, extinguish
for anyone not familiar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
Meta is cancer, it turns everything it touches into medical biohazard. It gives voices to the worst of society, and gives them space to organize. It devalues information available out there by diluting it with useless crap, and worse, it makes shit look as valuable as well-researched and well-thought-out pieces.
However, having said all that, I'm torn as to what I could personally do about a meta-owned Mastodon instance.
While I can certainly contribute my voice telling instances, especially my home instance, to defederate from them, I can still see how even an isolated Meta instance can do damage. There's nothing stopping Meta from having their own instance, nor other instance owners from federating with them. Even defederating with instances that have federated with the Meta instance would do damage by encouraging factionalism and the overall fracturing of the Fediverse.
The best way of dealing with cancer is to be eternally vigilant, eliminating them at their very roots. I am not sure how I, an ordinary user in one of the larger Mastodon instances, can help.
This may be controversial, but I see this as a net-positive for the internet long-term. The more momentum the Fediverse has in terms of growth, the more incentive other services have to join it, and the more everyone on the internet can be on the same page. One of the worst aspects of the internet right now is that different services don't even speak the same language; there's so much fragmentation. The fediverse forces services to be about the quality of the service itself, rather than the quantity of the content being hosted.
I'd rather see incredibly slow growth rather than have a corporation in control.
I will avoid this like the literal plague it is. I don't believe for a single moment they have good intentions. My guess is that some people at Meta have identified the fediverse as the future and they want to try and find a way to capitalise on it and possibly monopolise it.
In general, it's great when companies embrace standards and open source. Though in the case of Microsoft, they just did it to gain the market share (embrace, extend, extinguish).
I'm under no illusion that they would be doing it out of the kindness of their hearts or desire to be compliant with standards.
But..i also don't think I can criticize them yet for wanting to do so.
Lmao want nothing to do with them. One of the reasons I’m here is to escape these dogshit corpos
They what now? Wtf
Meta is developing a twitter like app called Threads which will implement ActivityPub.
I don't know anything about it except for what you said, but yeah fuck them. I'd much rather donate my money (well, once I get a job that is) to a bunch of people to maintain a server and simply jump on another instance if anything weird happens than use another Meta's (or any other shitty corpo's) products
I’m here because I hate what meta and other companies are doing to the web, so I detest it.
Eternal September anyone?
Queen sacrifice anyone?
Oops.. Sorry, force of habit.
They'll probably adopt, adapt, and extinguish. So no, fuck 'em.
My problem with that is then the fediverse doesn't grow, meta controls the largest instance, and they make money off any posts that go viral here. I have to disagree for those reasons. They can go.
And they’d probably build in things to a slightly off standard so it’s not fully interoperable and when people call them out they’ll say it’s an improvement and they’ll be making it public any day now pinkie swears.
They're trojan horse. We can't stop them from creating their own servers, but we can choose to defederate them. Up with the Anti-Meta Defederation Pact
I think this is so interesting...
For a refreshing change, we have corporations coming to the users, not the other way around.
I'm deeply skeptical, but I'm glad communities and hubs have the power to block them outright.
undefined> we have corporations coming to the users, not the other way around.
because the users are the product, and the product is learning to walk away. They must follow.
Pros
Cons
I didn’t know they’d joined. Do you have a source for this?
Definitely looks interesting. I’m not a fan of corpos either, but still it’ll be fascinating to see what they do with it, particularly since Bluesky turned out to be such a dud.
Makes more sense for Meta to create their own "Metaverse" than join an open-source network.
Instagram and Facebook already communicate, it won't be too difficult to include WhatsApp into that mix.
If they buy something like Mastodon, it would make better business sense to cut it off from the Federation and sync it with Meta's products instead.
Mastodon software is still open source under agpl-3. As far as I understand the license terms, every change to the software has to be open sourced. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License)
mastodon gGmbH can still be sold, but my guess is that it won‘t be of much use to zuck.
That's really nice to hear, hopefully we can have our own little or bigger anarcho oasis without corporate greed
I'm not ok with wanting the Fediverse to grow at all costs. Meta's userbase is shit, the company is shit, zuckerberg is shit. Meta is becoming irrelevant and I don't want to help them, let them slowly rot.
We know very little at this point. My view is “wait and see”. Little point in speculating about things now IMHO.
If they join the Fediverse I am leaving. We have made the Fediverse to get away from coorporations like them, letting them join us will defeat the whole point of what we have.
The great thing about the fediverse is you can just not federate with them.
It probably won't effect how the fediverse runs, but there may be some growing pains with trolls from meta.
I suspect it will cause a rapid development in moderation tools for lemmy
Will be interesting.
More likely to be noticed by calckey,misskey/friendica users who are on platforms.more similar to Facebook. Probably noticed by Mastodon users.
Not sure if kbin/Lemmy users will notice. This is based on me not noticing posts from these servers on Mastodon, calckey etc
Nope. Money will buy blood.
Screw meta.
I view them embracing federation as a good thing.
I also view it as important for the instances I wish to follow to never federate with them.
But is it even possible for a mega corporation to embrace federation? Isn't that essentially a contradiction in terms?
It's the kind of embrace a boa constrictor wants to have with a rabbit. The answer always needs to be no.
Exactly. Absolutely anyone can set up an instance.
Want your own Instagram type system? Roll out a Pixelfed server. Want your own Lemmy.
The #Fediverse is big. Very big. Probably up into tens of thousands of servers. No company could take it over, which is by design.
Google runs gmail, which like all email service providers is basically federated with all other email service providers. Hasn't stopped smaller email providers from continuing to chug along just fine.
To be clear, though, that's a best case scenario. It's definitely possible Meta could try to warp the Fediverse so that it kills all instances other than their own. We'll have to be vigilant and proactive to make sure that doesn't happen here.
This is my primary concern; if smaller instances say "we will block them on sight and anyone who federates with them as traitors" then it's a matter of getting the largest instances to go along with it and suddenly you've blocked a large chunk of users due to the fracture of smaller ones trying to defederate their way out of the problem and into a different issue.
I think @JakeBacon has a reasonable take, there are some upsides, and some downsides. I don't think there is anything that is gained by pre-emptively doing anything though. If they run their own instance, see what it does and then decide accordingly.
Can you personally block content from specified instances, for your own user? That would do it for me just fine.
Yeah as a user you can block a person or a domain, which was the intended first step, not pre-emptive defederating.
I thought the domain block was the domain of linked content? There's other reasons I would want to individuall block instances: for example, those which are primarily languages I do not speak. Nothing against the content, it just isn't useful to me.
For myself, I'm not a fan either. But I think it could be a very good thing for the fediverse (still not a fan of that word) --- which, as I understand it, is all about choice: the ability to easily access content across the fediverse, with the ability to ignore it just as easily.
If it ends up breeding toxicity, then I'll block any subs, and possibly the whole instance†. And if it gets really bad, I'll just find a lemmy/mastodon/whatever instance that has defederated from them.
† Sounds like this maybe isn't possible yet, but is being looked at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397
I think @tchambers put it well on his Mastodon post: no need to preemptively block, but "stay vigilant with eyes wide open and a finger on the block button."
I think this is like a Lucy and Charlie Brown trying to kick the football situation. How many times are we going to give capitalists who have shown their true colors over and over the benefit of the doubt and be shocked when they proceed to embrace, extend, and destroy?
It's not a preemptive block, it's a block based on a history of problematic actions.
Edit: Though idk if "blocking" them from making an instance is even an option. I expect a separate island of instances not federating with for-profit instances.
I did my senior college paper on the fuckery that Facebook and Meta has caused and how harmful their data collection has been to American society. I will stop using any services that are bought up by Fuckerberg.
I do not want them in the fediverse and will not tolerate them for a second. The moment they form an instance is the moment I block their instance.
Fuck. Meta.
Mind sharing the TL;DR about your paper?
They handed data to bad actors who then targeted groups of citizens down to groups of 10 people on social media with hypertargeted "dark ads". These ads were only shown once and couldn't be found again.
This targeting was focused at all groups, all races/ages/demographics/political leaning but decently increased towards the green party candidate for a good second towards the end of the election. It was mainly positive towards Trump but focused heavily on all candidates to sow division.
In spending, if I remember correctly, Clinton spent like 8mil on social media campaigns. Trump spent something like 180mil.
Facebook facilitated and was complicit in all of this. They collected the data of how long we looked at things, where our cursors were, who we communicated with, etc. They benefited from all of this through the ads.
I feel like it's their choice if they want to host an instance.
Stay the fuck away
Can’t people just defed
They wouldn't join. What's the point? It's not like the fediverse is currently big enough to concern them and if they did, they wouldn't want to share their users with the rest of the fediverse. If they do join, it will simply be to stomp out competition before it becomes competition. They could probably start a network and have more user than the whole fediverse in 1 week (not saying it would be sustainable).
They're already actively working on it.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/11/this-week-in-apps-tiktok-style-feeds-come-to-spotify-and-reddit-metas-fediverse-plans/
It's fine and good. Normalize federation
I'm excited to get some of my Facebook groups onto the fediverse,buyt still a wait and see approach makes the most sense before wholly endorsing this. Corps have a habit of "worst of all worlds" decisions tbh.
How are they joining the fediverse?
By moving to ActivityPub. That's what Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin, etc all use.
To paraphrase from a bank robber - Meta is where the users are. If we want open source technology to grow, we need to have users. If you block Meta out of the gate, how do you get their users to transition? IMO, energy should be spent on strategizing how to get the users to transition to open source instances, not getting people riled up to block them immediately.
They will datamine any instance that federates with them. They have had so many privacy issues it would be insane to give them the benefit of the doubt again. A leopard can't change its spots.. Not to mention the NSA docs & Cambridge Analytica.
They have proven themselves to be a hostile actor on the Internet.
I think 99% of users just want to log in with their sad little Facebook ID and have everything already censored and tuned to their liking. You have to understand, people view it like Netflix. Entertainment.
And then there are people who use the federated tech to get away from contributing to the profits of these companies. We will always be maybe 1%.
I agree, so many people here quick to shut down a massive potential source of new users. Meta can 'enshittify' their own instance, but ActivityPub as a whole was designed so that no one entity can control the service.
I think we should let them consume Fediverse content but not create it.
If Meta proposes to let Instagram users follow people on Mastodon or whatever, that seems like a reasonable compromise - they get to keep people on their feeds viewing ads and we get more reach - but they shouldn't have the power to leave and take a large % of Fediverse content with them; if you want to make a post, you need to do so from a non-Meta-controlled instance in a non-Meta-controlled app.
My problem with that is then the fediverse doesn't grow, meta controls the largest instance, and they make money off any posts that go viral here. I have to disagree for those reasons.
Makes no difference to me. Those who believe they have privacy just because Meta and others don't yet have their own instance are mistaken.
I don't believe at all that I have any privacy on the internet. As someone in the US, I pretty much assumed I lost that when Bush signed the Patriot Act. My dislike of Meta joining has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with their love of destroying good things for the sake of profit. I have no desire for yet another thing to become a corporate bullshit farm. This is honestly my last resort. If the fediverse is dismantled for profit, I'll just stop any type of social media whatsoever. It's not worth it to me.
I'm trying to think about how they could ruin the fediverse but can't think of anything. If they contribute to the code, it must be open source. So it's either shit and isn't included/no one adopts their changes or it's actually good and makes a better service.
I agree with you on the privacy front - if they want to gobble up data, they can do that now without their own instance. If LLMs want to scrape the fediverse for data there's no stopping them either.
There's plenty of "I want nothing to do with them" here in the post but I'm not really understanding the risk. This isn't an approval of Meta as a company - I just want to understand what people believe the risk is.
From what I've seen, people are worried about Facebook using the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish paradigm to take control of the fediverse and become the only relevant platform.
Between here and the debates on mastodon/Calckey it seems there's a lot of fear their data will be scraped without understanding that Meta (or any corp) can do that without setting up an instance. The other is not wanting all that meta crap in their feeds… but that's solely up to the people they follow. Lastly is the EEE, but ActivityPub is an open protocol so there's no stopping them from using it any more than stopping them from using http. And preemptive blocking by some instances will do nothing to stop them from using it either.
Every corporation that's joined the fediverse in the last seven years has been prophecized to be the end of the fediverse, and we're still here. Right now everyone is rallying around an idea, when there's literally nothing to do about it yet since there is no meta instance yet. The only thing we can do is continue improving this place and making it be a place people want to join. Not create nonbinding covenants and pacts against a company's future actions.
To be clear, I'm not saying we should embrace them with open arms, but defederating bad actors takes two clicks. Admins should be wary and make informed judgements about this the same way they do for every new instance that joins.
This is all so well put. Much better than I was able to communicate.
ActivityPub feels like plumbing to me in the way that TCP/IP feel like plumbing. Meta, Google, etc all use the same plumbing - so what?