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.
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.
EU should hurry up with their federation laws.
What do you mean?
Holy shit! Had no idea! Thanks, mate.
Common EU WThe 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.
I like the EU as much as the next guy, but you can’t tell the whole story without mentioning this disaster.
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.
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.
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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.
They will set up a CDN for uploads on their platform that will track you like v.meta.com or i.meta.com.
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.’
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
