Kev Quirk, one of the admins of Fosstodon (a Mastodon instance), destroys Meta in an email exchange.
fosstodon.org
The exchange is about Meta's upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
The exchange is about Meta's upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
A 45 minute "round table" with multiple rando masto instance admins? That doesn't sound like enough time for the table to get very round.
It sounds more like 5 minutes introduction, 30 minute presentation by Meta, 10 minutes Q&A. But oops our presentation ran just a bit long, and I really do have a hard stop at noon so we really only have about 5 minutes for questions thanks for all of the valuable feedback we'll be sure to circle back offline.
Ah, I see you've taken part in Bullshit Corporate Meetings™ before!
a true person of culture!
"We here at Meta take people's privacy very seriously and are committed to protecting our users. Unfortunately at this time we can't discuss what measures we've put in place."
Because we have none, as it's counteractive to our revenue models.
Translation: Nobody needs to know how much money we offer you as a bribe.
My guess is that anyone attending will have to sign an NDA. That will make it hard to speak out against Meta joining the federation. If someone does say anything, the Meta lawyers will destroy them.
They did with the last one. That's why there's so much distrust about it.
Do you have a link? I'd like to know that
sorrystory too.What an absolute legend. Also, I do so solemnly swear that any instance caught federating with meta is going straight in my hosts file.
You have been warned.
share the list, I'll add them to my pihole!
I am looking for a new instance because my admin is on the fence.
@bandario @giallo Look at you being a big boy with big threats. Up until a month ago you and the instance you're in didn't even exist on the Fediverse. You think your empty intimidation tactics are going to work on anyone? Don't take this as me supporting Meta btw.
Oh look, a tough guy behind his keyboard.
So you will block Fosstodon?
That statement is refreshingly sane. Really sick of the amount of heat over this situation and the lack of light.
An infamously vicious predator walks up and bares its fangs at us, and half of you want to pet it instead of fleeing for your lives.
It's hard to overstate my disappointment right now.
Meta isn't as cute as predators in the wild.
They're the type to freeze instead of fight or flight
Freezing would actually probably be better, in this case I think its fawn.
Most ot the users here still have Facebook/Instagram accounts they use daily. They like to talk up the fediverse but also post minion memes to their grandma. It's kinda sad, but it is what it is, and that's why you see so many Meta defenders.
What a horrible click-bait title. No one and nothing was "destroyed" here. He replied in a polite manner to a company whose goals do not align with his own.
Anywhere Meta goes ads will follow and privacy will flee.
"Reports of Meta's Destruction Greatly Exaggerated"
OK, it's one of my pet peeves that every fricking disagreement is headlined as X destroyed Y. Click-bait is the bane of the internet and makes everything worse. Don't participate.
I'm glad Kev got to speak their mind, but I highly doubt this changed anything meaningful over at Zuck HQ.
Exactly. I don't get what was so great about being passive aggressive to a Meta employee
Seriously, if you want to see them squirm, hit them with a wall of silence. They clearly feel they need something and, for Meta, negative feedback is better than no feedback at all.
To create an Instagram account, your identity has to be validated. I prefer anonymity. Once Meta gets their foot in the door, I guarantee they will try to bully the fediverse into doing things their way. Hard pass for me.
Can you give any reasonable by means in which they could do this and succeed?
So much of this stuff just sounds like infeasible conspiracy theories. If, hypothetically, Meta did do such a thing (somehow, still not clear how or frankly why?) all that it would mean is that anyone who disagreed could defederate from Meta, or would be defederated from Meta... which given half the servers in existence seem to want to defed them up front anyway, doesn't seem to make any odds.
It's all just very confusing hearing about these lurid ideas for things Meta could do with the fediverse that simply don't make a lick of sense either in terms of motivation or implementation.
Blog post discussing just that, including examples of past similar moves by MS and Google.
What is a mystery to you about motivation? We are another herd of cattle for them to collect data from and monetize - nothing more.
Edit - fixed link.
Great read. Those who don't know their history indeed...
For some reason, your link doesn't work.
The second part of your comment doesn't answer my question, nor would "they want our data!!!" explain why Meta would want or need to create an instance in order to get it, or how the "data" (what data? Your posts? The ones that ActivityPub syndicates to hundreds of other servers automatically? Do you know exactly which servers your posts are on at the moment?) of other users on other fedi instances could somehow be "monetised" by them.
Monetizing and controlling user experience is their bag, not mine. I don't have an expectation of perfect privacy here, but neither do I have an expectation of being milked and corralled into funneling my entire life through the platform to be harvested, which is exactly the entire model of Facebook.
Having Meta come in and be the 800lb Gorilla isn't going to move things in any direction that is good. This isn't some new company we know nothing about. We know everything about them, and we know above all else that the boundaries of what they are willing to do in order to monetize users is limited solely by what they are prevented by law from doing.
Here's a raw link without me trying to hyperlink off of regular text, hopefully that will work: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
OK, I've read that link and it still doesn't really explain how exactly Meta intends to monetise other peoples' posts - "collect data from and monetise", how exactly are they going to monetise other peoples' posts on other instances, when they have no ability to e.g. serve ads to those people?
Well, it's neither my desire nor my obligation to control your opinion on the matter.
It seems a pretty clear strategy given literally every single thing we know about the company. They've got a bunch of well paid smart folks who do just that for a living. I don't need to be able to predict their moves to have a sense of what they will push for. There is literally not one single example of them doing anything else as a company.
I don't think anyone is questioning your cynicism of Meta's intentions or motivations, but the nature of the Fediverse is specifically designed to make it very difficult (if not impossible) for any one party to control the entire thing. It's a question of how not if.
The worst thing I could see is something like the development of React where FB has an overwhelming advantage in sheer resources and ends up having a major influence on the direction of software trends. But that would still just be a popularity thing and would not actively stop anyone from doing their own thing. Maybe there is something in the license for ActivityPub that would let them pull a Google-vs-Oracle reverse engineering, but again that won't stop other instances or developers from ignoring them if they wanted.
Knowing they want to do it, combined with their track record, should be enough reason to resist. We don't have to understand HOW to be wary of it.
Edited to add - there is ample evidence it's what they will do, and absolutely zero evidence that they intend to use us for anything but their own interests. It's literally the one and only thing they have done as a company.
Here's the rundown:
What? Defederating doesn't fix that.
The solution is 1: to make sure users understand that it's a bad idea to flock to meta's instance, and 2: to implement that feature in the fediverse if everyone likes it so much they're willing to leave. The solution is not defederating now because of the posibbilty that they do that in the future.
But meta cannot claim all the fediverse as accesible content. Therefore making it akin to using facebook and reddit. Separate services that serve different demographics
It's not cynicism if the other party has a track record of behaving in an anti-competitive manner. The Fediverse became a competitor once it showed non-negligible growth.
It's not cynicism, it's weariness.
Because it’s what we’ve come to expect from large corporations suddenly joining the table of any FOSS project that is adjacent to their financial stakes. Coexistence is possible if they can profit from the software without assimilating it, but it also stands to reason that they will be pushing for new interoperability standards that benefit their own business model at the expense of users in some way.
The lowest hanging fruit would be something that allows them to associate Fediverse accounts with users whose marketing data already exists in their database, or providing a service to third parties that helps them tie their own databases back to Fediverse users. This would require some sort of hook that encourages the users to either associate their Fediverse accounts to an existing Meta service, or otherwise volunteer common PII such as email address that can be cross referenced. Maybe some kind of tracking cookie that accomplishes the same.
Keep in mind that this is just an example, it is not necessarily the exact angle they are pursuing. I’m not in the automatically defederate camp, but a healthy amount of skepticism is definitely warranted.
——
Edit: Also worth a read: https://kbin.social/m/fediverse@lemmy.ml/t/83284/How-to-Kill-a-Decentralised-Network-such-as-the-Fediverse
If fediverse admins come back to us saying that they have figured out a safe way to federate with Meta, then we will know that Meta got to them (financially). Maybe that's why they want an off the record meeting?
The proverbial canary in the coal mine.
Read up on what they did to XMPP, an earlier federated protocol.
Spoiler: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Imagining Meta wants to expand into another platform isn't a conspiracy theory. For one, Meta could paste ads into more online spaces. They could also replace twitter without having to develop their own platform or pulling a Musk. Both of these would, yes, allow them to be more profitable.
Let me give a hypothetical: Meta makes their own nice, QoL-rich instance that could integrate with Facebook/Instagram. They could also add in analytics and ads and allow that to federate with other instances. They could allow other people to host their own version of this Metadon. If it gets adopted (because it "just works" or otherwise), they could cut support for the instances not running Metadon, taking a large portion of the userbase with them. They would have their own twitter clone (complete with users), they hardly spent time developing it beyond loading Mastodon with their crap, and they would have other people also hosting Metadon (and their ads) without Meta paying a dime.
If Meta does get a sizable userbase then they can absolutely leverage that to force other instances to play their game or defederate.
This part could actually be enough on its own, TBH. Imagine that there's one Fediverse instance where you can interact with the rest of the Fediverse and interact with FB and IG, but it doesn't propagate stuff between the two networks (i.e. it doesn't allow people on Beehaw to see what someone on FB posts, and vice versa). Now there's a reason for everyone to migrate to Meta's instance, and a built-in way for Meta to advertise the migration to everyone in the FV. Once it sucks up enough users, it just de-federates from everything else and goes on its own way.
I mean, look at EEE like Microsoft did in the 90s.
Personally, I'm also scared about Linux after Linus dies. They are on a lot of the board as well
So they can overwhelm it, when they become the majority of the users they become in charge with the loudest voice. Then they steer it their way or make sure it dies.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Someone else just posted this explanation. TLDR is essentially, one of these giant corporations can destroy a network by joining and then later walling off their own part of it. And it's been done before.
I have read that and been linked that multiple times.
I responded to it here: https://finecity.social/notes/9gcoisoofl
tl;dr: Facebook and Google didn't "destroy" XMPP. XMPP was used by basically nobody before Facebook and Google picked it up, and after they dropped it again XMPP is still used by basically nobody. Its spec also doesn't include support for features that consumers expect to have in messaging software, which is part of why nobody uses it.
Kinda shook at the Meta-supporting comments. They should not be anywhere near the fediverse. Meta is a business first and the users are the product. Companies now just want to maximize profits, minimize costs, and hoard wealth for... rocket ships? Fediverse itself is community-owned, independent, and decentralized.
With how new all of these controversies are, it's kinda baffling that people are still defending this company. They're going to continue to exploit anything and everything for profits. It wouldn't even surprise me if the genuine reason they're interested in this concept is because they want to take what's open-sourced, adapt it, and commercialize it. I would imagine they're thinking, 'why invest in a brand new backend when we can profit off of an existing one, unrestricted.' And this "meeting" that they're forming is basically a free forum for them to learn and ask questions about how they can exploit the Fediverse and find any way to profit off of it. "Off the record" anything is shady as fuck.
Exactly, off the record means the expectation is Meta will be given free expertise to gain an edge on their competitors. Don't give diddly squat to actors who want to commercialize your content. It will never end well for you, only Meta.
Also: why would you want to discuss confidential information in the presence of Meta of all companies? Their reputation precedes them.
The only confidential information about the fediverse that I can see is account information. And maybe metrics. But most metrics can be gathered by polling APIs of servers anyway. It's an open system, unless they defederate with you.
IMO the "confidential" part is that they want to offer this person some kind of deal to shut their shit down or assimilate. Basically, they're going to offer to "buy them out" (though that phrase doesn't seem completely appropriate to the non-corporate world, so it's a little weird to use it).
I sincerely hope that as many admins as possible instantly defederate from metas instance if they ever launch one.
Yes. Keep those manipulative crooks away from the fediverse!
Because tons of Lemmy/Kbin users are still addicted to Facebook/Instagram. They'll defend their drug dealer to the death.
A good response. Civlised and to-the-point.
I disagree.
I hope there'll be people discussing sensibly.
For example the question how the rest of the fediverse would like Meta to act, when / if they have the by far largest instance on Fediverse with Threads.
Should they Rate-Limit queries from their users to other Instances, as to not overload them? This would protect other instances, but make the federated experience worse, driving more people to threads.
Would the Fediverse rather that Meta mirrors images etc on their servers too, or pull those from the original server?
Maybe they have UX ideas that would be useful to have somewhat uniform (like the subreddit/community/magazine stuff here), and would like input on them.
Of course just blocking them is an option for the fediverse, but doing that blindly seems like a missed opportunity for both sides.
More freely available content would be great, wouldn't it?
Maybe they have Ideas on the protocol, that they want to talk with admins about as a first step to gain more perspective. And certainly they are likely to be data-hungry greedy shit, but there is a chance that they are actually good ideas - there are actual people working at meta after all.
There's tons of ways in which this could be useful, and I don't really understand the completely blocking approach I see a lot of.
They want to use ActivityPub, that's awesome, finally something new and big that uses an open freaking standard on the web. What are the downsides? If it sucks for communities they can easily block Meta.
Yes, Meta is not a Company working for the betterment of the world, certainly.
But maybe, just maybe, goals align here, and Meta can make money and improve the Fediverse and the Internet with it. And certainly, maybe they want to "take over" ActivityPub, and that would indeed be bad. And even then, wouldn't knowing because they told you be much better than knowing because they're meta?
So, if they want to change the Protocol, be very, very wary of their proposals. But even there there they could just want reasonable improvements because they suddenly deal with 100x of the next biggest instances.
tl;dr: when you tell people what you'd like them to do, it increases the chances of them doing that.
The issue is once you open these floodgates you're not going to be able to close them, at least not without alienating a vast majority of users on both sides. Furthermore, once meta gains the majority of users and content on its instances (and this is really more of a "when", not "if" situation), they can start making changes to AP and overall infrastructure and forcing other instances to either adapt to that, or get left behind one by one, similar to what google does regardless of W3C and other browsers have to adapt even though it goes against the agreed standard.
If meta gains a foothold in the fediverse and eventually start isolating the smaller instances, it's going to be the email situation all over again, we'll have just a few large trusted providers and the rest will be a seemingly unsafe niche that most people avoid. Giving them the benefit of the doubt is just foolish, meta will not let a few fediverse admins dictate their policy (even assuming they have the backbone to stand up to them, and considering the recent meeting/NDA/"shareholder" drama most of them definitely don't).
Better to nip it in the bud than let it fester like a wound. Give companies as evil as meta an inch and they'll take a mile.
I mean, users of Meta producs are already plenty alienated from Lemmy etc, aren't they?
I mean, it's a matter of... minutes? hours?, probably not days even.
That's why I'd like to be able to talk to them.
And I agree that these are very very dangerous. I wouldn't say they could only be bad, but still.
Anyway, not following bad changes by meta would leave people where?
Exactly where they are right now.
In that case, Meta joining the fediverse would have been a failed experiment.
Billions of people using interoparable software to talk to each other. Email is a brilliant success!
Yes, having "few" larger instances isn't great, but on the other hand most companies run their own email server, and those talk fine with anyone else.
Doesn't seem like a terrible result to me.
Much rather "the Email situation" than the "whatsapp situation" or "signal situation" or "facebook situation" or "reddit situation" or "instagram situation" or "tiktok situation" where you have to join that specific thing to talk to people.
Not really, in the greater context of meta controlling the vast majority of fediverse we would be the ones that are a failed experiment, a niche group of old people yelling at clouds, not willing to get with the times and join the instance that has all the content, all the users and all the new tech improvements. Just look at how much shit beehaw got for temporarily defederating the 2 largest lemmy instances, now imagine when that happens to your instance and it gets cut off from meta permanently. It'd be like trying to maintain a twitter competitor while twitter was still in its golden age.
People don't create private instances or join smaller communities for their email provider, they go to gmail, hotmai or even protonmail for the promise of stability, safety and compatibility with others, not getting listed as spam bots or their mail going straight into trash. Companies have dedicated people to handle this but in my experience even they just end up using microsoft or google software in the background, just with their custom domain. It is a big success for email and these corporations, it is a terrible story for the open and community-controlled internet and fediverse.
I feel like this already describes us pretty darn well.
So I don't see the disadvantage to potentially going back here.
you mean like the 89.5% of active users of kbin being on kbin.social or 50% of active lemmy users being on lemmy.ml, lemmy.world or beehaw.org?
That's just normal, and as long as it's still possible to create smaller communities it's fine.
Not quite sure what your point is, just general apathy? Currently the servers you listed are practically 100% of fediverse, we're literally the early adopters right now and not the isolated obsolete old people. If meta comes you're not going to get to "go back here", that's the whole point of discussion - what them coming means for the current fediverse and what kind of damage it can cause.
Fediverse has gotten a massive sudden influx of players and it's natural that everyone rushed the few available instances. If anything, the fact that it's split between kbin.social, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, beehaw rather than everyone being on just one is already a good sign.
¯\(ツ)/¯
You can still do the same on reddit yet you felt the need to come here, so obviously you care at least a bit about outside interference.
That we have different perspectives. I already see us as the old guys shouting at the clouds (of reddit etc) for being bad. I certainly shout enough at most of Metas and Googles and Apples and Tencents products to fit that bill. I certainly don't have all of the technology that some other people use, because I'm not willing to sell my soul to those companies any more.
I don't feel like an early adopter. Lemmy is 4 years old, ActivityPub is 5 years old, Mastodon is 7 Years old.
I feel much more like a niche idiot who doesn't want to give FAANG the rights to his data, and because of that doesn't live with the times and doesn't have google maps, isn't on instagram for my friends to reach and doesn't know about the latest tiktok trend.
No, it's about what happens here when meta comes. We will not stop it.
And yes, Meta can do quite a lot of damage, although I'd guess a "non-meta-fediverse" i.e. a fediverse that completely blocks all meta-content would reasonably quickly look just like this, because it's what we have right now.
Anyway, because of the damage they can do, one should talk to them. Even if you can't sway them one iota, you learn of their plans, and can act accordingly.
I don't think there's a point in continuing this discussion, we obviously have different expectations and experiences about this. I'll just leave you with this article that is being spread around that says all of what I've been trying to say in a much more detailed and sourced way. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Maybe you get something from it that you couldn't from my comments, otherwise I just hope you're right and history doesn't repeat yet again, somehow.
This is super naive. Facebook/Meta has zero interest in "playing nice" with competitors in any field. Their intentions with the fediverse are not pure, and you're a fool if you think otherwise.
This is capitalism, and this is one of the most profitable corporations that has ever existed on the planet. A corporation who has made those profits almost entirely from the private data of its users (and even some users that aren't subscribed to their service. That's how much data they have).
They don't "work together" with competitors "for the good of everyone." That's a pipe dream.
Respectful post, but respectfully disagree. The longer the fediverse can stay free of monetary-driven communities, the longer it will last. Wait until the proposals for blue check marks and karma hit the ActivityPup "plus" standard and it's too late for the platform.
That's nice and all, but before we get to any of this there's a fundamental incentive schism to overcome first. People flock to the fediverse because they are tired of being treated like cattle. If you are not the paying customer, you are the product. And you will never--NEVER--be catered to. That's the bottom line here.
I agree. The Beautiful thing here would be that people sick of Meta could still go to fosstodon, and they could still talk to their niece on Metas Threads.
I can't help but see that as a win for the people not on metas software.
The problem here isn't talking to Meta or Meta making a federated platform.
Nobody can prevent Meta from doing that anyway.
The problem is the need to push against the insistence of Meta to keep these meetings off the record. It's against the entire philosophy of something like not only fediverse but FOSS in general.
If Meta wants good faith, they have to show it first.
Notice that in the email, Kev gives his guidance as to the matter. Do whatever the fuck you want as long as you put people first and make a product for the purpose of serving them.
This should be the attitude everyone should have first.
We will accept you as long as you're bringing value to us, not the other way round, got that Meta?
As long as any dev is taking this approach, Meta included, I'm supporting them. If someone is secretive about their intentions about a public service which is not a for profit endeavor inherently, I'll have a hard pass too.
How is it a win for me if I specifically signed up for a fediverse account to get away from data-hoarding, money-driven corporations like Facebook? I don't want Facebook to have access to my account information, posts and comments. I think you're missing the point about who this company is and the extent to which it is willing to go to get people's data.
Fucking thank you. Are people really this gullible? Maybe I have a different perspective because I've been free from Facebook for like 15 years now, but do these people really think that Meta/Facebook wants to be nice to its competitors? Suddenly they're going to give up the business model that has made them one of the biggest, most profitable corporations that has ever existed on this planet, and do the exact opposite of what they did to get there? LOL.
I'm honestly questioning if TheYang is reading our comments or if they are just spewing the same talking points regardless of the arguments presented to them. It's baffling to see people so willing to embrace a corporation that has done nothing but exploit its users and their privacy.
I'm questioning more than that about TheYang.
I hate to break it to you, but the very nature of the fediverse (as a distributed network where posts and account information automatically get distributed to hundreds if not thousands of independent servers you may or may not be aware of, that do not necessarily have to honour your deletion requests) means that it would be absolutely trivial for either Facebook or any other random bad actor you could think of to have access to all of that, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
This is an example I've given a few times, but if Meta were really just wanting to suck down data for the evulz (why they would do this I have absolutely no idea because it's not like they could use that data for anything), they don't need to start an instance amid a blaze of publicity. They could just go on Mastodon.social, sign up for a no-name account, grab an API key and suck down the contents of the fediverse in real time and that's the end of it. The fediverse is not private and its very nature means that control over one's own data is not quite as secure as ActivityPub advocates would like to pretend.
But that wasn't my point. It's not that I think that Facebook or Google cannot scrape Fediverse platforms/instances, it's that even if they do, they cannot serve targeted ads based on our activity here.
We have different definitions for privacy. Since I'm active here, it should be clear that to me private doesn't mean hidden. I like how the EFF put it, in their article on the Fediverse:
This is another one of those things where Meta's claimed motivations for this don't seem to stack up.
How exactly are Meta supposed to serve "targeted ads" to me, @bloonface, if I am on finecity.social and not [whatever Meta's instance is]?
If I don't have an account on their service, and never visit their website, they have no opportunity to put a tracking cookie on my computer, no opportunity to serve an ad to me (other than directly messaging me, behaviour which would absolutely get them defedded instantly by anyone who is even close to being on the fence about their presence), no link between my finecity.social account and any Meta accounts I may have... what benefit do they obtain from this?
Bluntly - how is this dastardly plan of theirs actually physically supposed to work?
A lot of people seem to have ascribed omnipotent powers to Meta far beyond what they are actually technically capable of. They can't deliver you a tracking cookie or make your instance display a banner ad to you through ActivityPub, ffs.
Your posts and comments are public. Everyone, including Meta, already has access to them.
That's not the problem. The problem is that Meta will control and ultimately destroy the Fediverse.
If that's the case then there's no need for it to be off-record. Unless the conversation of what you pointed out is open to scrutiny it shouldn't happen.
This is the real point here. If this is a legit talk about legit points then it can be open for everyone to see.
Starting talks with Meta behind closed doors can never happen. If they have something to say or ask then they can do it publicly.
I am all for talk, because that's the part that hurts no one, but make it as transparent as humanly possible from all angles.
I also want to know what "the enemy" is up to, so invite them to talk as much as possible, we do not need to agree to anything just because we were talking/listening.
In my experience when you tell huge corporations what you'd like them to do, it has no bearing on whether or not they will do that.
Facebook/Meta wouln't even moderate out incitements to genocide when multiple people asked that of them for years, so it seems naive to assume they care at all about the people in the fediverse.
They are profit driven with a laser focus, and this is a really obvious attempt at co opting, not collaborating.
This might cause instances to have a legal obligation not to federate with them, as some countries forbid you from supporting places where hate speech exists.
An interesting and nuanced response - thank you. I'm not quite sure I agree, as it rather assumed good faith - but food for thought.
There seems very little incentive for Meta to federate with anyone, except good faith, right?
They'll double the Fediverse Userbase in an hour, or less.
The 'embrace, extend, extinguish' strategy is a well known one. Set out with a strategy to become the biggest instance, capture lots and lots of new users. Introduce some swanky new features that 'unfortunately initially don't federate very well, but we are working in that'. Then defederate from other instances that don't adopt your features - etc etc
Facebook has done federation before - for example, back when they weren't winning at chat, they integrated their chat system with other Jabber / XMPP servers so that people felt chat wasn't a walled garden and could talk with people using other clients.
How did it end? 7 years later, once enough people were on Facebook Chat, they closed the gates to the walled garden by completely ending XMPP support: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/07/16/131254/facebook-finally-ends-xmpp-support-for-3rd-party-chat.
So it is really just about leveraging the fediverse to get users onto their product (and their current products, while they are similar in that they are about social networking, aren't really like exactly like Lemmy or Mastodon). If they are successful enough, what is to stop them locking the gate to the walled garden again?
But they won't be capturing new users from the Fediverse, they will capture them from Facebook and Instagram, and since this is mainly a Twitter competitor, also from Twitter.
I think you're missing the point. We are weary of Facebook's decision to enter the Fediverse exactly because we know it sees the Fediverse as a long-term threat and it could try to extinguish it. While they at first would adopt open standards and protocols, what stops them from creating proprietary extensions and using those and its dominance and resources to make it difficult for users to switch to other platforms in the Fediverse?
Nothing, which should probably raise concerns around how good a standard ActivityPub actually is if all it takes to drive a truck through its intent is one bad actor.
Is it really fair to call Facebook just one bad actor? It's one of the largest corporations in the world, has some of the largest social media and messaging platforms out there. In terms of resources, there are very few companies, let alone individuals or groups, that can compete with Facebook.
If you look at it in these terms, you understand that Facebook has an interest in making sure that ActivityPub doesn't too large without Facebook having a say in it. If it could control the whole internet, I'm sure it would. So, no, I don't agree with your framing of the issue.
I mean, it is just one bad actor.
I don't think that ActivityPub is having any present difficulty keeping itself niche without Facebook's help - fedi has a total active user base of something like 2million, it's very literally a rounding error on Meta's user numbers. If there's a battle here, Facebook is already winning.
Here's an article that goes into detail about why Facebook joining the Fediverse means the end of the Fediverse: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html.
I'd guess the plan is that if the fediverse and meta mingles together, the fedi-users start to follow the meta users in such amount that when the breakup finally happens, they are reliant on meta to continue. People stay on facebook, eating the ads and manipulation just because their mothers and friends are there.
Just thought about the future nightmare of receiving an invite on mastodon to a friends private meta-instance "party" and to view it you are suddenly offered to either decline or import your fedi-account.
Even if they are acting in good faith, I think they’ve earned our derision and deserve to be shut out. You don’t get to play unfairly for decades then turn around and expect no consequences.
The history of Facebook (there I said it) and the EEE example MS already provided us years ago (as referenced by @HeartyBeast ) does not incline me to believe in their good faith. If Meta has proven one thing over and over and over, it's that their interests will always lie in harvesting of user data to enrich themselves, and that any restraint on their part will be that which is legislatively forced.
Let the Fediverse grow on its own. It's not a race. And it's surely not a race best won by letting the wolf in through the front door.
The day we federate with Meta is the day I find the fediverse instances that refuse to do so, and take my account there.
Edit: Blog post on this topic that goes into some detail about historical precedent and etc.
No incentive other than good faith? This is one of the most profitable corporations that has ever existed, talking to one of its competitors. If you think this is how corporations operate, I've got news for you. This is like Capitalism 101.
It'd be entirely open to Meta to simply turn off federation, in the same way that Truth Social and Counter Social have.
But honestly if I were them, given the hostile reaction I'd probably just do that and knock the whole ActivityPub thing on the head. It feels like a waste of time when realistically they would get more people on Threads/P92 in one day than a million Musk-buying-Twitters could do with Mastodon. Then everyone is happy - no Meta on fedi, Meta gets its new exciting Twitter clone that it fully controls.
Put it this way - either they're up to some form of non-specific evil, in which case they can probably achieve whatever goals they have far more concretely if they fully control the content on Threads, or they're not and all this is actually in good faith, in which case they're doing this for the benefit of a few hundred thousand fedi nerds who have reacted mostly with hostility and are going to block it on sight.
A more important topic is, what federated data will be kept on Meta, and most importantly HOW that data will be processed/used/sold by Meta.
Guarantee they are already scraping every bit they can.
Everything you post online is public by default, stored, copied or archived by third parties without your knowledge. They don't need a huge instance to grab data from the fediverse if they want to do that.
God thank you, I swear some people fail to realise just how ActivityPub federation works!
Post something on fedi and you lose effective control over it; for all intents and purposes, it's out there on hundreds of different servers who don't have to respect your deletion requests, and it's never coming back.
And to be perfectly honest, I'm more comfortable with Meta archiving all my shitposts than, I dunno, all the nazis.
@TheYang @steb They want to use an open protocol? That's great.
But then they should be open about their intentions, and not send invitations to a few select individuals to a confidential "off the record" "roundtable". This seems just too fishy to me.
I agree with you, and I appreciate that Facebook at least tries to reach out, but after all that happened I also understand that there is a certain aversion against Facebook.
I doubt most people moved to the fediverse simple because of better content. Personally I didn't. And quantity doesn't mean quality.
Contributions are open for these people. But the moment the contributions are facilitated through Meta, they represent Metas business interests.
Control. Meta could swamp the fediverse and just because its open source the current platforms wouldnt necessarily continue to exist in the same way they currently do. We could see even bigger fragmentation or breaks, some Admins might feel forced to federate with Metas service, leading to the currently existing community breaking up.
Imo the last years has proven, without a doubt, that those things simply do not align.
To conclude: We have seen these things before and they havent ended well. People here seem to undererstimate the power Meta has and the impact that this power has. Even if all current instances were to defederate from Meta, simple association, user demand caused by an influx of Meta users and hard to guess power dynamics would make the fediverse a far different place than it currently is. To make a comparison: you cant drop the gravity well of a black hole into a small, complex planetary system and expect it to be unaffected.
I get your argument, but fundamentally
doesn't hold true. For example I don't need a flood of Instragram thots on my Mastodon or Lemmy pages, even if I got it for free. Quality is more important than quantity, I am here for in-depth discussions on current events and issues we face, with individuals capable of empathy and critical thinking. Considering the types of interactions that come from Facebook and related sites, I need better public reassurance that Meta's involvement won't tank the platform and it's vibe.
We've handled the Reddit migration about as well as we could have hoped, but the folks on Meta are a whole different beast. Many will be fine but there will also be a chunk of people completely blind to forum Nettiquite.
Lastly Meta acting behind closed doors is antithetical to FOSS development ethos. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I would refuse closed door discussions but be open to public ones. NDAs are rich corporations' tools to silence people.
Yeah large EEE on ActivityPub feels like almost a given if they start to use it.
But should you block people from embracing a good thing, just because you're scared they'll try to extend and extinguish?
No one is preventing people who have Facebook or Instagram accounts from joining the fediverse by blocking Meta. What they are doing, is preemptively taking action to ensure an immoral company doesn't do exactly what it has shown itself to be in it's nature to do.
Thanks for answering "the Yang" so that I don't need to :-)
Remember, don't feed the trolls !
I really wish kbin had user tagging just so I could tag you as a "leopards eating faces" party member.
If you think that, then you haven't read up on Facebook and XMPP.
Meta's motives are simple: destroy the Fediverse.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
I can imagine all sorts of technical points like how the firehose will be load-balanced so as to not overwhelm any instance, or what metadata they should include in their feeds. Meta also has a lot of AI and moderation expertise that could be of benefit to the Fediverse once it grows into an attractive enough target for the troll farms and spambots.
Quite frankly, the sooner that festering cesspool that is Twitter is killed off, the better off the planet will be. If it takes Meta to wean the talking heads like Oprah from Twitter, so be it. It would be better if Oprah set up her own instance, but that's unlikely to happen, media businesses still haven't understood they need to take control over their distribution rather than the easy way of going through big social networks that will stab them in the back when expedient like Facebook deprioritizing media outlets from users' feeds.
I really hope that we'll be able to maintain a strong resistance and fortification against Meta taking over the fediverse.
Only defense is to defederate meta and any instance that chooses to federate with meta
What defenses are in place?
We should bake it into the software (Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, etc.) as a first line of defense. If you want to federate, you'd have to fork the server first.
I agree, the decentralized aspect is a huge plus and makes this system . But I think the OP's approach is fundamentally misguided and I have my suspicions for a few reasons.
It's a 45 minute meeting that provides an insight into Meta's operations. There's no need to contribute anything, just sit back and listen.
There's no reason to post about this and brag about it now. Compare this with what Christian did when Reddit tried to claim Apollo was blackmailing them. There's no leverage now, just some internet points.
We have one email and a response. Was there any further communication? How do we know this is all that was said? I could go further and question the legitimacy of this screencap but I'm willing to give OP the benefit of the doubt here.
As others have pointed out, how does shutting them out completely stay in keeping with fediverse principles? This is legitimate question since, to me, it seems like despite the risks, it's antithetical to the spirit of the fediverse until they demonstrate bad behavior here.
To quote OP's email, "Zero interest in having a conversation with #Meta 'off the record or otherwise." "Otherwise" here is...on the record. So OP also won't meet with them in a completely open meeting?
Look, I get it, I dislike Meta too. But this just seems like a misstep and bragging for zero actual gain.
how much bad behavior do you want to see before accepting that MetaZuck is evil and has no go intentions?
There's a literal trail of dead startups and bodies.
Think we are in good hand if this is by any indication. Lol
Fuck Meta and all they stand for.
They have done nothing to earn open community's cooperation. On the contrary, they have not atoned for weakening democracy in countries all over the world AND distributing powerful data about its users both for money and by inadequate security.
OK, I'm just using fancy words to say Fuck You, Meta and Zuck in particular.
'Member when the Zuck assured everyone that Facebook cared deeply about their privacy, and then immediately turned around and quietly implemented features where people had to opt-out of sharing all their shit (when opting out was even an option at all), and those users didn't even know it?
Ah, the good ol' days. And I don't even resent it due to being personally affected. I've never had a FB account, and I just watched from the sidelines as it affected people I know and love and the broader online community as a whole.
I need meta to just stay away from the fediverse forever
FB: We're confused why someone would sign up for a social media site set up by somebody in their dorm room, tell us how to be more like you.
Meta also: forgetting how their original IP, Facebook started in much the same way.
This is Fosstodon's official stance on the whole Facebook joining the Fediverse debacle.
Which is a bad plan, TBH. At this point in history, zero waiting needs to be done to know exactly the sense of Meta's involvement. The "if" is a certainty.
yeah i mean i... don't know why you'd "wait and see". it's literally Facebook. they're going to negatively impact your community, if not in features (lol) then in sheer size and volume.
It's hilarious for Meta to invite some person who happens to run a server to an "off the record" conversation with "confidential details that should not be shared with others" anyway. LOL.
The only "confidential" information that's likely to be involved in such an exchange would be some kind of bribe for the person to shut down or assimilate their infrastructure with Meta's. It's not like they're going to reveal Meta's trade secrets to someone they believe to essentially be a competitor or anything.
The main issue I take with this is saying it is off the record.
And non-disclosure mentioned. Will they be wanting participants to sign an NDA?
i haven’t seen any hard confirmation, but i believe one of these mastodon admin meetings has already happened (the one attended by the universeodon admin) and an nda was involved. this would be the second meeting.
That's standard practice if you're going to be talking about an unreleased product.
And our "standard practice" should be to say "fuck off" to that BS.
Such bravery coming from someone who sounds oh so employed.
stepping in a bit to say chill, this is a bit much of an accusation to make over what appears to be a pretty simple disagreement (which you've more constructively elaborated on downthread!)
All right. Well, TBF I'd rather "sound unemployed" (whatever that means) than sound like I'm shilling for big tech corporations and their predatory practices. shrug
Signing an NDA to talk about an unreleased product is not predatory, it's standard practice for virtually any business (especially the kind inviting random people off the internet to see them). Many jobs require you to sign NDAs just to go through the interview process.
There is nothing gained by not going to the meeting with Meta, if they want to launch their Twitter clone they are more than capable of doing that regardless of whether or not this guy takes a meeting to hear them out. All he's done is learned less about what they plan on doing leaving him less capable of taking the best course of action, and if you trust him to make the right decision then that's objectively a bad thing.
Meta could probably mitigate at least some fears about this if they did any planning or discussions out in the open.
I get they want to have a massive "reveal event" or something, but come on...
It's entirely possible (but perhaps unlikely) that this is a passion project by some engineers and Facebook is just sponsoring them "hands off".
I dunno... this has rings of Libra (now Diem?) to it. Given engagement on Meta is down, it feels more like a playbook to tap into the zeitgeist and capture the shift in traffic.
I find it a tad amusing that this news about Facebook's latest attempt at fucking over the Fediverse is where I hear about the pixelfed project for the first time.
Gross, this is obviously their attempt to embrace, extend and extinguish the Fediverse.
Yep they'll be a good actor until they're the biggest instance and they'll try to turn the fediverse into whatever verse they're feeling like that week and shove it down our throats. We'll end up right back here in 3 years of we choose as a community to federate (i.e. give free content) to Meta.
I wonder if Gab was invited. It would be hilarious if the only instances willing to federate with Meta were Nazis.
I think Gab completely broke off from the fediverse at this point. not just from being blocked, but also not bothering to keep themselves up to date on their end as well. That being said. I wonder if Meta would be even aware of that, or if they would care if they considered inviting Gab.
But I imagine it's now likely that at least one person suggested inviting them and someone with some common sense shut that down pretty fast.
I don't think they "destroyed" Meta. Meta was polite and they were passive aggressive? What is there to celebrate?
Meta is going for a price run on failure it feels like, I worked for a company bought out by (no names to prevent breaking my NDA) them super publically and then a year or so later firing 90% of the staff and replacing them (for no reason) and leaving a skeleton crew.
And as expected things have just been on a steady decline ever since. The people running the show at Meta have to be off their rocks on coke.
They just wanted your former company to not exist anymore. That's what they do: see competition and eat it.
That's the thing though, it's still around and getting marketed by them as one of their major products. So they're beating a dead horse that they shot to death themself really.
Beating an astral dead horse rather than a corpse
Personally, I'm not planning on using the Meta service, but I'm not a fan of pre-emptive defederation either. The vast majority of P92 users will have 0 clue what federation/activitypub is, let alone actually log into Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin, etc. For them, they will forever think of themselves as @username, not @username.
I'm totally fine with Meta releasing an app who's posts are exposed via ActivityPub, along with being able to consume other posts via ActivityPub. If anything, I would like to think it'll drive more people off the Meta platform and into Mastodon, as moving to a federated app doesn't mean they have to completely break connections with their network on-platform with Meta.
Overall, I'm more in favour of allowing a personal user to choose to defederate from specific instances, because regardless of what happens, if Meta joins, there will be other companies getting on the bandwagon, and endlessly splitting up based of which instances federate with which others will eventually lead to the whole damn thing falling apart and the big players becoming the de-jure instances anyways.
I mean, the vast majority of Lemmy/Kbin users migrated from Reddit, as did the vast majority of Mastodon users from Twitter. I'm fine with keeping things open to help facilitate more user growth to community run instances, while also having a place for the less tech-savvy to get their feet wet.
There's an argument to be made that that's exactly why everyone else should defederate preemptively.
Exactly. I know it's a bit elitist, but I just don't care what meta users have to say about anything. If you're dumb enough to participate in their little data extraction operations then I don't want to know you.
“These dumb fucks keep giving me their data” - Zuckerberg
I think this is the logical pragmatic take. They'll start on day 1 with more users than the entirety of the fediverse. Defederating just allows them to ignore us and pretend they own the fediverse. We should at least try to win over those users and prevent FB adware software overtaking Mastodon as the dominant fediverse platform.
I don't understand why people think the end goal should be one network of Fediverse instances connected to each other. We already don't have that and never will.
Meta adding "more users than the entirety of the Fediverse" is irrelevant. They already have more users and content from Facebook, Instagram or whatever else Meta owns is not showing up on my Lemmy or Kbin front page. How would I notice any difference if the tech behind Meta's services is different?
If Meta wants a platform that's larger than anything else they already have Facebook.
The one and only reason Meta's looking at the fediverse is to scrape it for content. It's social content they risk being left out of and they want in. It's as simple as that.
Federate with their instances and they will scrape the shit out of yours, build shadow profiles around your users, feed all your posts and comments into their LLM, cross reference them with their Facebook data to figure out everybody's real identity, and so on and so forth.
I like to think they see the rapid growth as an opportunity to grab some Reddit refugees. I'm not sure they see the Fediverse as a viable threat YET. They could hedge it though and try to snuff it out while they still can.
Nope
This is how they destroy competition that they can’t buy out.
Microsoft did it with office, intell did it to amd
Their network can’t survive a competitor, they depend on no other option existing
Guaranteed this is about disrupting and controlling the federated network
I read a new article that said it remains to be seen whether P92 will allow users to see posts from other site (they'll broadcast to ActivityPub but undecided about displaying contents from federated servers): https://tech.co/news/meta-decentralized-social-media
This doesn't surprise me. The idea then might be to allow for people outside of their walled garden to follow (likely for big name accounts, celebrities, athletes, important people) etc, but not really be a true federated instance. In which case, I think defederating is even more pointless. Just let users on an instance follow who they want to follow.
At least here, if you're not a fan of de/federation practice, it's minimal work to change servers.
I'm not excited at the idea of my posts on another service entirely getting shipped off to a meta server for them to reconstruct my network through that activity. It's the same issue of as their shadow profiles, where meta knows who you and who you know by watching the posts your mom makes on FB.
Some of this is inevitable, I know, but I'm at least here for adding more barriers to privacy theft.
I do not beliythat 'celebrities' and athletes are important people at all.
They are important to capitalism. Not us.
https://thefreeonline.com/2015/10/20/capitalism-is-unnatural/
Most people who use social media disagree, and unfortunately for you, it's their opinions that matter most as to whether they use a given social media platform.
I don't really care to follow celebrities and athletes either, but I recognise at least that I am in a minority.
Oh I'm very much aware that the majority are not people that I want to interact with. That's why I find this whole situation so ridiculous. This community could stay it's current size and activity level and I'd be overjoyed with it.
Once you invite the majority to any platform, it's ruined. The choice is quite clear to me. Meta have shown quite clearly who they are and what they are interested in. Any idiot left on their platforms at this point is not someone I care to interact with. I'm not sure why there's any interest at all in what they have to say.
You're not wrong, but that's a minority opinion to the vast majority of the population.
Indeed, what is the point? It may be as simple as them trying to coopt the movement to get ahead of it and steal mindshare. Think Hitler and the intentional naming of "National Socialism".
"Oh, ActivityPub is the hot new thing, let's check it out," says clueless user #39,728 as they click on the first link in their Google search, which coincidentally now happens to be Facebook.
Edit: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
My thoughts are similar to yours, I don’t think instances should be defederating unless there’s a serious issue with the content of another instance.
Good instances should be winning over people by being better than whatever Facebook’s ad ridden, algorithm driven, instance ends up being.
I mean worst case you'll see @meta.com accounts in your Federated feed in Mastodon (which for pretty much every instance is already a complete mess), I don't even really see how it'll affect Lemmy or Kbin, as they're community driven rather than user driven. I follow users with Mastodon, I follow communities with Kbin.
I dunno, maybe I'm being necessarily optimistic, but I do have friends and family who are posting on Insta/FB, and I basically maintain an account there to keep up with them. I'd love to be able to keep that connection without having to actually be locked into Meta's platforms. And I do think at least a few of my tech savvy friends would be willing to give a client like Ivory a go if they're able to do the same.
Their idea is likely to eventually present themselves as the "better part of the network" and make migrating to their servers very easy.
This must be prevented at all costs.
I was talking about this with someone here the other day, and this seems like the logical direction for them. They'll create a cloud of instances that users are able to utilize and create their own communities with relative ease compared to compiling the code and doing the base level software management, and also develop Meta-specific featuresets on those servers to lock people onto their platform. Oh, you want to break away from us and manage your own instance? Have fun doing it the hard way, and without features XYZ that are only available from us!
That is not the worst case, by a long shot
And you’re not just being optimistic, you’re being naive
Since you clearly didn’t read the article the commenter linked I’ll sum up the important point:
Corporations routinely infiltrate and integrate with open source in order to destroy it.
Meta will implement federation, then they will “extend” the specification with a bunch of new features that the other places of the fediverse can’t put out as fast, making anyone talking to a meta user at a disadvantage, just like how Apple calls out non-iMessage participants in a group text.
They’ll also likely implement a different specification than they publish, so that anyone implementing the meta features fails due to bad instructions
It’s been done multiple times before, for decades
Ffs, I’m just waiting for Microsoft to start pulling shit with the Linux foundation now that they have majority seats
these corporations are not your friends, they are not on your side, they don’t even see you as slaves, you are livestock
A majority?! Fucking hell!
Using the iMessage analogy, we're currently in a state where green bubbles can't interact with blue bubbles at all. Nobody should be expecting full interop with a corporate platform, but for the long run I'd rather have partial interop at arms length.
Embrace extend extinguish only applies if platform is so focused that it cannot sustain itself without the extend phase, and the extend phase cannot happen without something to embrace.
XMPP suffered a lot from what Google and Facebook did to it, so I understand people's fears regarding Meta's take on ActivityPub.
It’s more than justified
Especially with their patent moves, this is a malicious attack on the network
On the one hand I can totally understand this reaction by Kev, on the other hand, by completely locking off all discussions like this, means that there's no way to change things for the better.
Granted, it's Meta, they're not to be trusted, but still, a discussion, if one has the time, wouldn't be too bad an idea.
I think it would be incredibly naive and foolish to believe Meta has any kind of pure motives for this.
One of the biggest corporations in the world reaching out to its competitor to try to get them to talk "off the record" about "confidential details"... Sounds like a pretty blatant scheme to get them to reveal confidential details about their competitor's product.
Or maybe Meta has broken with decades of its own conduct, and several centuries of capitalism, in order to reach out in good faith to their competitor. LOL.
Its a really immature and niave response from Kev. Information is power, he's chosen to operate without knowledge for internet points.
Meta think there is potential to enlarge their market and make money, Kev's response won't impact their business making decisions.
Kev should have gone to the meeting to understand what Meta are planning. That would help him figure out how to deal with Meta entering the space.
I don't expect he could shape their approach but knowing they want to do X, Y or Z might make certain features/fixes a priority so it doesn't impact everyone else
I think you are insinuating that because meta has money and power, he owes it to the community to hear them out. That's a capitalistic perspective that seems centered around either making money or having a larger 'market'. I wouldn't assume that this is the status quo for everyone involved in the fediverse.
Also, if Meta isn't willing to share its plans publicly, only to the owners of the largest instances online, I question their motives.
@macallik and if you scroll down the comments, Byron from Universeodon, who did take the earlier meeting, did provide some vague points from the meeting. Relating to your point about big instances, it seems likely that FB wants to throw money at them so that they won't become overwhelmed by the ensuing traffic (unlike the rest of us, I guess...) so they can demonstrate that the Instagram bridge (it's an IG product) works.
@giallo @madjo @nameless_prole @stevecrox
That is good to know. That doesn't negate the fact that this is the same company:
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/app-developers-sue-facebook-over-alleged-anticompetitive-scheme-n1117551
@macallik
Absolutely. If this is true then for the other small to mid-size instances it's not just an existential threat philosophically but technically. They're expecting Threads onboarding might just knock out instances because of the traffic. Might as well limit or block just for your own performance metrics.
Massive corporations never "throw money" at people or things without strings. I'd be very wary about what taking money from Meta would mean.
Having a larger market = having a larger network = greater network effects for content
Having Meta join with Mastodon might actually sway people off twitter and into the fediverse where it will be easier to migrate over to a different instance.
It's foolish not to hear them out, you accomplish nothing. This isn't some silicon valley episode where he has some arkane secrets that meta engineers couldn't figure out that he might leak. Meeting with them is zero risk and he would gain more information on what they're planning.
Not if they ask him to sign an NDA before the meeting, and you bet they would.
This is not a proper talk by meta that you could just "hear them out". They explicitly said off the record and confidential, there's no reason for that if it's something innocuous. There 100% would be an NDA involved.
The fediverse is all about being open, starting with an NDA is definitely not "zero risk", you can not slip up ever, or you're going to be destroyed by lawyers, this is the exact opposite of "zero risk".
They plan on showing demos of their product to them or talking about potential features it might have. Boom, they require an NDA.
I don't think you understand how the professional world works or how common NDAs are. I've signed NDAs while going through interview processes at FAANG and other large companies just so that we can talk freely about projects I might work on. Especially for a company like Facebook where everything they do will get about a dozen news articles written, they're going to make you sign an NDA for any conversation about an unreleased product.
I don't think your assumption on how well I understand how the professional world works is correct.
I understand very well that signing any NDA is by no means "zero risk", it has a definite risk attached to it. Declining it is costly in some way, but also has definite advantages.
I also understand that very rarely is the phrasing ever "this conversation will be off the record", but rather some phrasing including the specific topics that may not be shared, like you say for example, product details. Blanket phrasings like this are always very sketchy.
I think you are seriously underestimating meta here. They know knowledge is power too, and they have an enormous amount of resources to ensure that their information is shared in the way that exposes them the least and benefits them the most. Any one person is just going to be at a severe disadvantage and is much more likely to do damage than get something positive out of it.
It doesn't need to be said that Meta is purely driven by profit - that is any corporation. But Meta is incompetent and failing - yet still a behemoth. If they want to pour millions of dollars into the fediverse, then we don't we let them? They would presumably just be another site on the fediverse.
I totally support them joining on assuming it doesn't change the fundamental structure of the system.
Because, if we do, they will destroy it.
ok i'm not saying they won't but i've asked this before and nobody seems to be able to provide some mechanism by which they would destroy it
is the system not federated? if meta starts acting up, can't everyone just defederate them? this is what i'm not getting
if someone can explain to me what exactly is dangerous, i would appreciate
Read up on how they destroyed XMPP.
So was XMPP. That's why they're a huge threat to the Fediverse: they have experience in destroying federated systems.
Facebook didn't "destroy" XMPP. XMPP was a tiny messaging protocol nobody used, Facebook picked it up for a bit, stopped using it after a while, and then XMPP returned to being a tiny messaging protocol nobody used.
People are acting like Jabber was hot shit when Facebook picked it up, and its present state of irrelevance is because of big bad Zuck. No, no fucker used Jabber and it saw basically no mainstream adoption until Facebook and Google got involved, and as soon as Facebook and Google weren't involved (as it turns out that XMPP actually kind of sucks and its unique features are things end users don't care about) it returned to being a complete irrelevance. A well-intentioned irrelevance, to be sure, but an irrelevance.
Fediverse is the same, mutans mutandis. We're tiny. I know it's nice for us to psyche ourselves up and say that we're going to destroy the big bad corporate media! but in reality we are a niche constellation of social networks that has literally 0.1% of Facebook's user base and whose adoption has been, shall we say, not stellar.
Not stellar? We're having this conversation, aren't we? This place has proven to be an able replacement for Reddit, and the last thing I want to see is it become irrelevant because of Meta's involvement.
The fact that I (nerd that knows all sorts of shit about fedi and is interested in tech topics) am able to use Kbin/fedi to converse with other nerds that know about fedi and are interested in tech does not mean that the fediverse is a storming success.
I can have a conversation with one other person using tin cans and string. This does not mean that tin cans and string are the future of telecommunications.
In reality the people who I have tried to get on here who do not fall in that category were either disinterested from the start, were turned off by the complexity of how it works or stopped coming on it when it turned out there was nothing for them here.
I haven't really messed with Lemmy at all yet, but Kbin is almost exactly like signing up for/using reddit. if you can use reddit, you can figure out Kbin very easily.
I figured I'll write up a tldr on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish in case you aren't really feeling reading the articles.
Embrace: Meta builds a federated Twitter/Reddit alternative, potentially called Threads but is right now P92, that follows the ActivityPub standard almost perfectly. Various Lemmy and KBin instances federate with them and share information. Users from Facebook and Instagram flood into P92, making it one of the largest instances.
Extend: P92 starts adding nice, but proprietary features to their system. The allure of these features begins drawing users off of other instances to P92. Those instances are upset, but Meta insists it's doing nothing wrong, continues to follow the ActivityPub standard in some form, and tells the other instances to just implement the features themselves.
Extinguish: Meta announces that due to incompatibility, they are withdrawing from the standard and defederating from everyone. Most users of this software are now on P92, and thus don't mind. Meta gets a fully populated Twitter/Reddit alternative, and the remaining ActivityPub instances wither. Without user support, the standard fails, and a new open source alternative is created to replace it.
That strategy has been used to kill other open source protocols, and many people are worried it will happen again. My personal opinion is that servers should only federate with Meta if they follow the standard perfectly, and if they deviate even a little bit they should be universally defederated via software changes, but I'm sympathetic to the people that would rather be proactive than reactive.
I understand the concept of embrace extend extinguish
i just don't see a significant chunk of fediverse user giving up on open source instances and flocking to Meta's instance. I can't imagine what kind of features they could add that could accomplish this. Sure, they could make a site that's more polished but if Meta enters the game, we're going to be seeing a huge influx of both users and development. open source alternatives will likely be very close in parity
i think when considering this whole situation we need to calculate the potential positives and calculate if it's worth the risks - and those positives include huge amounts of money and people. this could be enough to push the fediverse to the next level of adoption.. the dream of having a decentralized social media system could become the standard in such a future.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This blog explains really well how destruction from the inside would work. And personally I'm not excited to have all Facebook users on here, most of that website is extremely toxic.
That article has been posted several times and does not explain how Google "destroyed" XMPP - it assumes that XMPP was some hot shit everyone was using before Google and Facebook picked it up, when in reality it was used by next to nobody, most people who used it with Google or Facebook were just using it to talk to other Google or Facebook users, XMPP doesn't support a lot of features that consumers now expect in messaging, and since Google and Facebook dropped it it has returned to being a niche FOSS thing - only now its advocates blame Google and Facebook for its failure rather than the fact it's not a very good protocol and nobody uses it.
So, because us laymen can't think of exactly how they would do it, that means it's not possible?
The best (and often only) indicator of future behavior is past behavior. And if we go on that, I think we all know how Meta looks.
you reduced my comment and favorited your own. lol
look - nobody has given me a concrete mechanism by which they could do damage. neither on here nor on mastodon where I've had similar conversations. @thesanewriter was the only one who attempted to give some sort of method - and his was that Meta's platform could become so popular it steals users. That to me isn't really unique to the fediverse
I'm not gonna hop over to Meta's platform just because it's nice and shiny.
But look at the potential benefits of Meta investing heavily into the fediverse.. we're talking millions and millions of dollars in development. i say milk meta for all they are worth, they're a failing company anyway, this is a desperate attempt on their part
Sitting to an off the record coveraation will be used as a hook agaiant you in the future.
They have enough lawyer money to bleed you dry, and your attendance (probably sign some NDA) will be used as basis.
I'm sorry, but it's on Meta to come forward to the public Fediverse and be open with their plans, not try to organize some hush-hush meetings with Mastodon instance owners.
Connectivity on fediverse platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy rely heavily on trust between users to maintain an engaging community. Unless Meta publicly demonstrates otherwise, people are right to distrust Meta at the outset, given their past and current affairs.
Meta's P92 should release itself on the Fediverse's terms, rather than Fediverse catering to Meta's terms. Otherwise, Meta should just make their own platform and see if Fediverse instances latch onto it.
Meta intends to harvest content and kill off competition before it poses a threat.
It feels like Meta has to pay like a billion dollars in fines every few weeks in europe for violations. And they don't seem to plan on stopping (based on the fact that it happens every few weeks). Even faintly hoping that you could even have the smallest chance of moving even the smallest gear in Meta by appearing in such a meeting is complete delusion.
You would still know what Meta is thinking of doing on the Fediverse, and adjust course accordingly. Now we 1) know nothing, and 2) have closed off an avenue to gain information.
Curious if you have a rough example of what type of positive information that will be gained from the secret, closed-off meeting, and how it could benefit the community?
How do you think we could frontrun one of the largest tech companies in the world?
They chose to close off that avenue by making it a closed, off the books, invite only meeting. And as other posters have already mentioned, its likely that the people that do show up might have to sign NDAs or something similar. So we might not have learned anything anways.
But if he attended he wouldn't legally be able to share what he learned - or do anything that reveals details of the meeting without facing the wrath of Facebook's legal department.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
You would also be under NDA, which severely limits your options. Meta is not stupid.
You would only ever know what Meta would be willing to tell you anyway. Also, there's the whole NDA thing.
Off-the-records convos w/ repeated bad faith actors seems like a liability.
If Meta wants to make an app that is competitive with other fediverse apps and is actually good, I don't see the problem. If they want to harm other fediverse instances then I do. How much harm could they do to the fediverse? Would they then block off all other apps when their app is the biggest essentially?
they could make their own custom version of the fediverse, slowly diverging from the core open source version, then push the actual fediverse into obscurity, the same way Google Chat killed XMPP. Imagine a new Meta-controlled "fediverse" where you can only have an instance if you use their code and their rules.
I found this article interesting and relevant: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
this was an excellent article. I'm old enough to remember being impacted by these events.
I'm not in Munich, but I remember trying to embrace OpenOffice, and telling my wife how pissed off I was that Microsoft wasn't following it's own open source document standard.
I remember Google killing XMPP, and there's also the more recent examples of what Facebook has done to WhatApp, Instagram, and the other potential competitors that got buried.
In other words they're trying a new way to turn the fediverse into the metaverse.
That makes about the most sense It possibly can.
I mean, they already did and it's called "Facebook" (and "Instagram")? Are people forgetting that Fediverse apps are being developed as an alternative to the existing commercial "social media"? Meta is already heavily invested in keeping users on their platforms and killing alternatives. This is 100% an attempt to do that. They just added a pair of Groucho glasses to it and think people won't see through the flimsy disguise.
You don't have to use it though?
No, of course not. You didn't have to use Google chat either, but here we are. I never used it but ICQ is still dead. My point is that the billion dollar companies have more power than just making instances. Once their instances have features that the rest of the fediverse doesn't, people will be motivated to use their version instead because "it's more convenient and I can talk to my friends."
So your complaint is that you don't want them to do it better?
If they do it better without contributing the improvements back to the standard then that's something to complain about. Because then all they're doing is a different, better, proprietary standard and they never really had any intention of embracing an open source project.
Well, FOSS. Open source projects can still be proprietary, as just because you can see the source code doesn't mean you have legal permission to use it as you wish.
Anyway, there's a simple rule about this: capitalist corporations NEVER have the intention of embracing FOSS. Like, people want to give M$ lots of credit for contributing to the Linux kernel for a while, but the truth is that their motivation for doing so wasn't to improve on Linux, but to gain advantage for their own hypervisor (and then cloud) platform. They'd tried to take over the web server space with Windows Server and realized it was never going to happen, so they took a step lower and tried to get every instance of Linux-based web servers running on Azure. Tailoring the Linux kernel for their brand of virtual environment was NOT done for the benefit of Linux developers or users.
It's not that they might do something better.
It's that they have a history of encouraging the competition to adopt an open standard (to gain the active users), and then purposely scuttling the standard in order to sink the competition (and leave the users with no functioning alternative).
"If Meta wants…" My concern is that the only conceivable motivation Meta could have for investing money in such a project is making more money. If, in the process, Meta destroys the eco-structure of the Fediverse, so much the better—less competition, more money for them.
That's exactly it and there's no reason to pretend otherwise. Meta is a financial instrument to turn money into more money. The only reason Meta would engage with any third party is to make their commercial products more attractive to advertisers. Play with Meta and before you know if they'll be writing all the rules about how you're allowed to run your instance.
"and is actually good" it won't be actually good because with Meta the users are always going to be the product. What you are thinking is exactly what they want to do. Build the best looking app first so everybody installs it, then they're in a position to start making the calls about the future of the fediverse.
If you think meta has any good intentions I would suggest reading this article about how they killed xmpp open protocol.
There objective will be simple, monetize and if they can't, kill off the competition.
Edit: grammar and spelling
Thank you, it was a good read
My view is if they did do that last thing, we'd be in exactly the same place as we were when we started - with "fediverse" as a tiny niche social network mainly populated by nerds, off to the side of all the others.
I think people have kind of failed to keep a sense of scale here - fedi has something like 2million active users, Facebook has a thousand times as many. We are quite literally a rounding error.
A more important topic is, what federated data will be kept on Meta, and most importantly HOW that data will be processed/used/sold by Meta.
meta can already freely pull that data from any instance
ActivityPub baby!
I’m surprised by all the negativity. Is it not a good thing Meta is going to use open standard instead of a proprietary one?
I think the whole reddit debacle has shown (again) that corporations and social networks don't mix.
What's Metas main incentive? Money, obviously.
What do people want? Social networking without bills, ads or privacy issues.
Those two things are incompatible.
I don't think that's true. Obviously we all think like that which is why we're here, but most people are still on reddit/twitter because they don't care about any of that, they only care about the content/experience
I agree with what you're saying, but remember that open source software cannot happen without individual contributions and donations. If you have some money to spare, even just $1 dollar, please consider donating it to the Lemmy developers. It's obviously not a requirement, but it helps keep the project going!
The FOSS community is wary due to "embrace, extend, extinguish" approach by various tech giants in the past. When a tech giant suddenly want to embrace federation while offering no details whatsoever, people are right to be wary.
The flipside is that a standard's not really open and a network founded on one isn't really resilient if certain groups or corporates arbitrarily aren't seen as "allowed" to use it, or if conversely a big corporate joining it is so toxic to the entire endeavour that it must be blocked on sight.
Chris Trottier, someone who I disagree with quite a lot and is a far bigger advocate for decentralisation as a public good than I am, is quite sanguine about P92 on those grounds.
Personally, I have no plans on my instances to submit P92 to any more stringent rules than I would with any other server blocks, that is I will give them exactly enough rope to hang themselves with.
Quoting Chris Trottier here:
I disagree with him as strongly as possible. That view is to the point of abhorrent. The problem at the core is that he and everybody in the "let's allow Meta in" group is that they see it as this big machine everybody should be using, while the rest of us care so much less about that than about the communities that have formed and have been slowly growing here, that are about to be strip-mined by Meta as they do EEE.
We do NOT need to wait and see, we have years of experience of Meta's modus operandi, and the communities of the Fediverse just cannot survive their invasion. And we don't want that!
Including this one.
The concern is that they will attempt to "embrace, extend, and extinguish". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,\_extend,\_and\_extinguish
It's not about standards. It's about how "Meta" is going to use the data they'll collect to manipulate and advertise to you in insidious ways. They don't want to cooperate with the Fediverse, they want to control it. Those are the issues and the source of negativity.
I think they have a history of being amoral/indifferent towards the spaces they create/impact of their (lack of) moderation, and as if that wasn't enough, I also think that they are entering the fediverse at the worst possible time in terms of disdain for corporations
May the disdain never fade until monopolies are destroyed.
Sic Semper Tyrannis
Early on when Google wasn't shit and Facebook was just coming out of the startup phase both of them had chat platforms based on XMPP (the OG federating protocol). For a few glorious moments everyone could chat with anyone through the corresponding XMPP endpoints. At some point they decided they can't be arsed anymore and shut off federation on their servers. They captured enough market and siloed their users.
There's 1 million % this will happen again. It's textbook EEE.
Well done on Mastodon admins for not cooperating with Facebook's strong arming tactics. Facebook's server will evolve into another walled garden, Mastodon federating with them will only help them.
Fuck them
It's not
Thanks for sharing, that article is fresh out of the oven!
Having been interested in Open Source software for a few years, I always give big companies the side-eye when they suddenly take great interest into FOSS projects.
I am not against talk and federation, but Meta needs to make clear their motivations if they want the Fediverse's trust at all.
They have already lost all trust.
Precisely, they are starting from a position of zero or negative trust for many. For me, they don't get the benefit of doubt unless they earn it back.
Even if they make their intentions clear, why would we believe or trust them? What's to stop them straight up lying about their intentions? When there are investors involved, all ethics go out the window.
Meta is not going to "use" this technology, they want to own it. And youncsnnbe certain they will try their best to build a walled garden with a Facebook login, so the masses pick their form of fediverse rather than the one not controlled by big tech.
Peoples negativity comes from experience with these corporations. You are probably pretty young if you don't see how bad they are.
You say this as if the masses are currently interested in fediverse in general, and give a shit about whether it's controlled by big tech or not.
Fact is most people don't know about fedi and a great deal of those who do don't care, and the only chance you'll get them anywhere near a fediverse service if someone (be that Meta, or anyone else) wraps it up in a little bow for them and delivers it to them.
Meta does some interesting open source work, extra hands on fediverse open source might be reasonable.
It sucks that a company as evil as Facebook also built and open sourced React.
React is incredibly popular because so many companies use it. They are banking on Facebook's continued support and development, and an assumption that if Facebook is doing it then it must be right. Being rich does not automatically make one right. Having worked at a company that forced React on its developers against their wishes I can unequivocally say it's bad.
In any system the right action should be the default action. Query parameters should be parameterized by default, variables in HTML templates should be contextually escaped by default, and so forth. "Don't make me think". React is the complete opposite of that: It requires you to constantly think about the render loop (aka "Component Function"), it hides the fact there is an object behind the scenes containing the component state, the documentation is littered with "don't worry about this feature until after you have a performance problem, then come back here for the solution", it's very neat and tidy for tiny example projects but does not scale well as the project grows.
Using useMemo and useCallback to Save the Past from React Langoliers + Thoughts on React vs Vue vs Everything Else in 2023
Compare that with a system like Vue or Lit, which is much more intuitive, does the right thing by default, and is easier for existing HTML/CSS/JS developers to grok at a glance.
Don't forget Svelte. That said, traction means more developers trained in any tech stack, that's why my previous company ditched Vue for React circa 2016, Vue seemed destined for oblivion and irrelevance at the time.
That is the primary argument my company used to justify forcing React. Do you know how many people we hired for their React experience? One. Everyone else was primarily backend or only had passing experience in React (not subject matter expert / does not know best practices). Meanwhile the rest of the team struggles to work in it (the frontend has become siloed) and very little of it follows best practice.
lmao I love that article, thanks for the link!
Ironically enough, I just got done troubleshooting some insane rendering problems that a
useMemofixedI've been meaning to scope out Vue and never heard of Lit - thanks for some weekend inspiration
@smokinjoe An interesting reaction to react is Svelte: https://svelte.dev/. Instead of sending an entire application to the browser and making the poor client run all of it, do a crap ton of compute and calculation at build time. Send minimal code and computation to the browser. Totally different paradigm.
Anything good Facebook/Meta has ever or will ever possibly make, immediately becomes garbage due to where it came from.
Fruit of the poisonous tree.
This has me thinking, is there a space set aside for putting profits over people instances out and center so admins can preemptively defederate and/or block them?
I haven't found one yet but I am rather new to this.
I think it'll be harder than that, even.
Meta doesn't need to spin up an instance to abuse user data on the fediverse, they just need an app that can read it. A hypothetical meta fediverse app could allow users to select their own instance and still read and collect data on the connected instances. As far as I know, there is no way in the protocol to prevent this.
It‘s not just about the data—which is bad enough but as you said they could just write a crawler to get at it. The question is why would they want to federate and why now? Meta being Meta the most likely reasons are terrible for the fediverse and it reminds me very much of Google and xmpp. I saw a really good writeup on this yesterday: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Thank you for sharing this, it was a fascinating and frustrating read
they may be able to read certain data from another instance but their current platform allows complete surveillance of what you looked at, how long, every click and scroll, etc while also being able to feed that in to manipulating what you see.
imo it will be basically impossible to have that kind of impact on people from instances not controlled by them, particularly if the other instance defederates so they don't see meta instance content.
See yashima's comment below: them adopting ActivityPub is just another way of killing it. The link they provided I think should be mandatory reading
Our exchange here is public, a gift to humanity and all aliens that might stumble upon it. If meta can make money from it, so be it. But anyone else can just as well.
Except they can build proprietary code on top of it and take over open-sourced activitypub adoption
It's just another way to kill competition
The people who would use a Meta variant will use it, and people like us will not. This reminds me of the interview with the Mexican restaurant that spawned Taco Bell. The lady who owned it essentially said, "I'm glad he (the founder of Taco Bell) was able to take our teachings and turn it into something. Good for him." If they build proprietary code, that's nice. ActivityPub will still be the same open-source code it's always been, and all of the Fediverse stuff will still exist. It kinda sucks that Meta is trying to make it seem like they're the good guys, but in the end there isn't much they can do to the already established stuff beyond make their own.
Edit: also, if they do try anything, we at least have previous data and most of the people who care about freedom to privacy here that I'm sure we could come up with something. We're not getting blindsided like with Google and XMPP back in the day.
The "extend" part is fundamental before they can actually get to the "extinguish" stage: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Once Meta joins in, a new set of dynamics are going to develop between old fediverse uses and new meta/fediverse users. If Meta adopts an "EEE" approach such as the ones described in the article, there's going to be disruption in the user experience from which the fediverse might never fully recover
Edit: clarification on the last sentence, my main concern is that a growing niche protocol such as ActivityPub might be destined to irrelevancy after Meta is done with the Extend & Extinguish, similarly to what happened to XMPP
We shan't bend the knee!
I have mixed feelings about Facebook being a part of this, but I honestly don't know if I'd want to get closer to Facebook. 💀
what are your mixed feelings? truly, what do you think is the positive of meta getting involved?
Not op but one positive is making their users aware of the existence of the Fediverse and providing an opportunity for non-meta servers to take up some of those same users. The question is what means are available to do that without putting the community at risk.
There is no chance a Meta version of an instance will do anything to make its users aware of alternatives. That's beyond wishful thinking. Instead they'll leverage the work done by others to make a walled garden for their users.
Idm meta joining tbh. At least this means your friends can be on something and you won't be obligated to use a meta app to talk to them, peer pressure, etc
Until they pull an iOS sms situation, where non-iOS applications are missing their "exclusive features" and go as far as to break conversations through incompatibility, and then your friends are badgering you to "just join the 21st century and get an iphone already," but with Meta-branded apps. There's no way in hell Meta will play nicely with anything outside their ecosystem.
Exactly, they might play along in the beginning, even stretch it by putting all the non-Meta conversations in green text. But once their instance becomes the largest one, they'll start making it difficult for everyone else.
I do mind. EEE is a well established strategy. This time won't be different than every other time so massive tech company pretended to embrace open standards.
Your first mistake is setting a minimum expectation for a Meta product. They've not promised it will do any of that and they already have you thinking it will based on nothing but rumor.
I don't entirely disagree. An open standard should be open. I am expecting shenanigans from Meta from the classic "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" playbook though.
To avoid a Google XMPP repeat, I think the anti-Meta disfederation alliance might be the right path. Some instances can just outright refuse to Federate with corporate instances, others could have strict conditions, and more laissez faire instances will always have a backstop if (when) Meta starts playing badly.
It's tough to say though. Microsoft was the largest contributors to Linux for a few years, out of self interest. Optimizing Linux for running on Azure. Still, the Linux kernel guarded itself well, and Linux is fine.
Of course in the Linux kernel, you have lots of large corporations "cooperating" in some sort of standoff. If Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft all started using ActivityPub, you could find a similar situation emerge. The popularity of Gmail doesn't let Google break email so badly that it doesn't work with Outlook (or Yahoo, AOL, etc).
Instagram already had an app named Threads. Can they not think of a new name?
I agree with you guys, it could be problematic to work with #Meta but maybe it could be the step we need to make the fediverse mainstream. The things to discuss are the conditions but the frontal confrontation baybe will not be the answer this time.
savage