How do we feel about Meta joining the Fediverse?

archchan@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 13 points –

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.

80

My feeling about Meta joining the Fediverse is: 🚨DANGER!🚨

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.

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?

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Lmao want nothing to do with them. One of the reasons I’m here is to escape these dogshit corpos

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

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

Pros:

  • my friends join
  • larger community = more content
  • meta funding would likely contribute to fediverse growth and improvements
  • any instance can defederate them from said instance, which would mitigate almost every con

Cons:

  • Meta is evil and wants all your information to profile you and sell to other companies for profit

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

Fuuuuuck no! This isn't actually happening right? This is just an idea I hope?

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.

Embrace, extend, extinguish

for anyone not familiar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.

Nope. Just nope. It'll be the death of the Fediverse.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I guess I'll just go back to reading books and watching movies full time.

Fuck all of those tech giants.

I say we just don't allow them on most kbin/lemmy instances. Let the people decide what info is bullshit or not.

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.

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'd reaaally rather not have that happen.

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

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.

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.

But all this work [GPL licensing] was ridiculed. Microsoft, through Github, Google and Apple pushed for MIT/BSD licensed software as the open source standard. This allowed them to use open source components within their proprietary closed products. They managed to make thousands of free software developers work freely for them. And they even received praise because, sometimes, they would hire one of those developers (like it was a "favour" to the community while it is simply business-wise to hire smart people working on critical components of your infrastructure instead of letting them work for free). The whole Google Summer of Code, for which I was a mentor multiple years, is just a cheap way to get unpaid volunteers mentor their future free or cheap workforce.

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:

We created all the components of Frankenstein’s creature and handed them to the evil professor.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don’t think I could disagree more. We value the fact that this tech can be scraped, API’d and redistributed. That’s kinda point and partial cause of the protesting going with Reddit at this moment. ???

We have abilities to block it ourselves. We want options and features to customize our personal experiences as we see fit. That’s what we are trying to build here.

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.

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.