What reason could Zuckerberg and Meta possibly have for wanting to create a federated social media site?
I'm just curious what you folks think. The whole idea of the Fediverse seems to go against everything Meta has stops for with their existing platforms (Facebook and Instagram).
What are they after? Are they going to try and infiltrate it so they can get people's data and content? Are they trying to monetize it? It just doesn't add up. I feel like most people on the Fediverse already would agree that we don't want Meta's platforms to access our content.
Please excuse my ignorance if it doesn't work like I think it does. I'm relatively new to the Fediverse myself.
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I think they want to destroy it. They don't want us to have freedom away from their data collection and ad bombardments.
Best way to do so is to get in. Some one posted an article about what they want to do.
Here the article https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is why Mete wants in.
Holy shit thanks for the link. That’s a very good write up explaining why we should be very wary of Meta’s intents. And the wiki page link was gold. Fuckers truly want to Embrace and Extinguish.
You're welcome. I thought it was a greart write up and help me understand what was going on as well.
Yes, a very good article. I have the feeling I have another peace of the puzzle now.
It seems so weird though. The fediverse is small. Extremely small. They are taking on Twitter. A million users on mastodon doesn’t matter when Twitter has 250 million.
I agree that fediverse is only a few million. But the fediverse is also highly populated with refugees from twitter and reddit at the moment, who just want another stable and popular social platform similar to what they've always used.
If anything, the fediverse will have people with stronger opinions: either they're willing to change social media because of a couple bad changes (and aren't too attached to the fediverse), or they're hardcore fediverse fans who are less likely to move to threads than your average twitter user.
If we assume it to be a 50% split, then meta has a chance at stealing half the fediverse by promising a larger user base, thus more content, but on the false premise that Threads will be backwards compatible with the fediverse forever.
Agreed. All this reminds me a little of some of the discussions that inevitably appear in professional-photographer circles whenever some online service with photo-sharing features changes its terms and conditions. Everyone is convinced that the giant multinational company is spending millions in a laser-focused effort to steal business from photographers, because "making money with photographs" is the lens through which they view the world. And from that point of view it's hard to see that the entire industry of professional photography is too tiny to be worth Google's or Meta's time to even try to steal.
One of the things techngiants do is to get control of new startups and trends before they become big, and either consume them or destroy them.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
And weirdly, a lot of startups have the goal of being bought out by a mega-corporation in a couple of years and live off of that money.
Which does make sense. Most people work to make a living and what a better plan is there than to make something that someone pays a ton of money for and stop working. Or after that do something that you want instead of have to.
If their reaction is this strong even though fediverse is this small, it means we have something incredible and should fight for it and prevent coporations from gaining ANY influence over it. I doubt we will get any more chances if we blow this one.
Twitter’s user count doesn’t even register to Facebook, either. They’re trying to be the only option
The bright side is that given the open nature of decentralized networks, nobody is forced to use whatever Meta shits out.
Not disagreeing per se, but for sites like Twitter and its clones, you go where the people you care about are. I have a mastodon account but I couldn’t tell you the last time I opened it because nobody I follow is there, and I don’t really care about following general topics or hashtags.
As opposed to a site like Reddit, the content is what matters, and I can get that content anywhere (RSS feeds, blogs, here, etc)
Yeah but people will. And the article explains how this can lead to the "death" of the open-protocol version.
There was a big Lemmy discussion about that article 2 weeks ago too: https://lemmy.world/post/467454
I remember that. So the question begs how does the current federated ecosystem stay away from that? Never trust any company if they say they want to work together?