How do we feel about Meta joining the Fediverse?
How do we feel about Meta joining the Fediverse?
Personally, I want nothing to do with them and I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I moved to the Fediverse to get away from all these corpos.
Judging from their past and all the bad actions they have done in the past, bad for democracy, privacy, minorities and marginalised people and how openly they have a far/extreme-right bias. Well I feel extremely negative about them joining in. They were also part of destruction of another open/federated protocol in the past: they played big part in destroying XMPP/Jabber messaging. So I am afraid they will do their usual embrace, extend, and extinguish thing and their surveillance capitalist thing and yeah. no good. Best to block their instances outright.
Yeah, I was thinking of Jabber as well, when I heard this. For a brief period everything was perfect. Facebook and Google were both using Jabber. And even WhatsApp was using it, I think. So if you had an account somewhere you could actually chat with all your friends, totally unimpeded.
EU should hurry up with their federation laws.
you can still use XMPP. i use it, my family uses it.
hate facebook all you want (i certainly do) but dont act like normies would be living in a federated utopia without them. theyd be on whatever is closed source with the most number of people and the most advertising dollars behind it and the simplest user experience. normies like easy, and its hard to blame them.
I was going to say, while we can't do Mich about them adopting an open protocol, please defederate with them
Ack. I just said almost the same thing before I read your comment.
They are free to set up an instance. Not sure who would federate with them.
Most Based answer.
Bribes
🚨 DANGER! 🚨
…That about sums up my feelings on this subject.
They see the fediverse trend gain9ng steam with the rise of Mastodon and go "Oh sheit we need to be on that for $$$". Proceed to embrace, extend, enshittify, and extinguish. Its nothing but Zuckerberg's gasping breaths to try and stay relevant as his company begins the very slow, but inevitable, backslide into technological irrelevance.
I will be leaving and/or blocking any instance that chooses to federate with anything related to Meta. They are antithetical to the entire foundation of the metaverse and they ruin everything they touch.
I'm trying to get away from Facebook and meta. I'd rather they weren't remotely near me at all
Exactly my thoughts, I don’t trust meta or zucky’s leadership, their motives will always be profit over everything else
Meta are doing WHAT‽
A federated reddit clone named threads.
Sounds like it is going to be more of a Twitter clone unless I read a shit article. It also sounds like they might not federate with mastodon or other instances to keep everyone in their meta ecosystem.
They will datamine all federated users They will set up a CDN for uploads on their platform that will track you like v.meta.com or i.meta.com.
They will probably train LLMs off the data. They will sell the data to advertisers or data brokers. They will most likely have ads or pay to boost.
They will diverge from the standard once they have the majority of users like google does with chrome and the web.
Everyone is already datamining the fediverse. That's the whole point of it, all the data is public.
They will set up a CDN for uploads on their platform that will track you like v.meta.com or i.meta.com.
This is the only thing they couldn't already do. They've probably already been datamining Fediverse users. No need to set up an instance for that.
I agree with the v.meta.com and i.meta.com. We'll have to establish some good alternatives by then so people don't use them just because they work so well.
Even if they were somehow not evil, the sheer volume would technologically destroy any instance that tried to federate with them.
I've been wondering about how that could work as a denial of service... Meta-scale would work, for sure
Nope. Just nope. It'll be the death of the Fediverse.
I hate the fact that for a large number of people, this will be how they will be introduced to the fediverse and their view of it will be tainted by Meta. I also dread seeing Meta spam in my federated timeline. And I also fear Meta building its own proprietary features on top of the ActivityPub protocol, making the content generated with them incompatible with independent clients, and allowing Zuck to spread his monopoly to the fediverse as well.
It's hard for me to see anything good coming from this.
I guess I'll just go back to reading books and watching movies full time.
Fuck all of those tech giants.
Fuuuuuck no! This isn't actually happening right? This is just an idea I hope?
To me it sounds like they are trying to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish the fediverse. I wouldn't doubt if at first they adopted it with all the standards then started doing proprietary crap
"Little by little, a little becomes a lot."
They'd start with little proprietary things here, then there, and before we know it the Federation wouldn't be the same Federation we're enjoying today.
The same thing happened with the Web since the 90s and 00s. Mark my words...
If Facebook behave and their instances have good moderation, they'll be successful. If they don't, they'll get defederated and turn into some niche twitter clone echo chamber like Truth Social.
Facebook is a company with great open-source tech contributions (React, GraphQL) but absolutely awful products (Literally every social media thing they've got their hands on), which is why they are desperately trying to turn their side project Oculus into their main product. And I think they, as the original "The Social Network" company, see the writing on the wall: that they either embrace federation and decentralization, or get swept away by it into the footnote of social media history.
Now, I don't think Facebook wants to JUST run an instance where they get to control everything. I think the most likely scenario is that Facebook will offer easy managed federated instance setup hosted on their own cloud servers for less tech inclined individuals and companies in the future, and they'll rebrand it as "the actual metaverse", which will finally end their tenure as an advertising company.
Is that necessary though? I feel like we should let them join. If they do something malicious, then we can block them. IMO, it doesn't make sense to just preemptively block them for no real reason.
They've demontrated their evil nature in the past, promoting divisive and inciteful material and anything to drive engagement for the sake of advertiser dollars. I don't think we need to wait for them to do it again in the Fediverse. Better to head that shit off right up front.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft did it before, we shouldn't let Meta do it now.
They what now? Wtf
Meta is developing a twitter like app called Threads which will implement ActivityPub.
we shouldnt let them in. they would have done decentralized service years ago if there was money in it for them. They either want us to stop or try to seize control in only way that can -> by worming in.
We must have zero-tolerance for corporations or we might as well just give up.
We must have zero-tolerance for corporations or we might as well just give up.
As long as servers cost money to run, corporations will need to be involved.
At a fundamental level, it's either
a) run by donations as a non profit, but as we've seen from wikipedia it will be a constant struggle to have enough money to last indefinitely (especially since Reddit / kbin / lemmy cost a lot more to run than Wikipedia)
b) run by subscriptions, which will greatly limit growth, reach, search engine optimization, etc.
c) run by advertising in which case corporate ad networks (like the kind that Meta runs) will need to be involved or
d) have instances that are government run / paid for, but it would be difficult to accomplish on a global scale and may come with restrictions that not everyone is happy with
It sucks but those are pretty much the only four options for running a digital community that requires paid servers and hosting space. Either corporations or some large government organization are going to have to be involved.
For myself, I'm not a fan either. But I think it could be a very good thing for the fediverse (still not a fan of that word) --- which, as I understand it, is all about choice: the ability to easily access content across the fediverse, with the ability to ignore it just as easily.
If it ends up breeding toxicity, then I'll block any subs, and possibly the whole instance†. And if it gets really bad, I'll just find a lemmy/mastodon/whatever instance that has defederated from them.
† Sounds like this maybe isn't possible yet, but is being looked at https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2397
I think @tchambers put it well on his Mastodon post: no need to preemptively block, but "stay vigilant with eyes wide open and a finger on the block button."
no need to preemptively block
I think this is like a Lucy and Charlie Brown trying to kick the football situation. How many times are we going to give capitalists who have shown their true colors over and over the benefit of the doubt and be shocked when they proceed to embrace, extend, and destroy?
It's not a preemptive block, it's a block based on a history of problematic actions.
Edit: Though idk if "blocking" them from making an instance is even an option. I expect a separate island of instances not federating with for-profit instances.
I'd reaaally rather not have that happen.
They're trojan horse. We can't stop them from creating their own servers, but we can choose to defederate them. Up with the Anti-Meta Defederation Pact
Give meta the boot
Bad. I just feel bad.
I think they would take advantage of Fediverse and destroy it.
I say we just don't allow them on most kbin/lemmy instances. Let the people decide what info is bullshit or not.
I have to say, i don't like it, i mean i got here, because i didn't want to have anything to do anymore with them, but i guess if we are careful enough, they probably can't do to much to destroy our current fediverse.
If they join the Fediverse I am leaving. We have made the Fediverse to get away from coorporations like them, letting them join us will defeat the whole point of what we have.
The great thing about the fediverse is you can just not federate with them.
In general, it's great when companies embrace standards and open source. Though in the case of Microsoft, they just did it to gain the market share (embrace, extend, extinguish).
I'm under no illusion that they would be doing it out of the kindness of their hearts or desire to be compliant with standards.
But..i also don't think I can criticize them yet for wanting to do so.
Corporations already joined the federated internet when they adopted the web.
Even if they wanted to, they can't take over the entire fediverse, that's the point.
That's what they said about the Web back in the 90s and early 00s. Back then we all said "companies can't take over the entire Web. If they tried something, anyone could just make their own site." But they didn't need to prevent others from making a competitor site; they just needed to make theirs take up a big enough piece of the pie. Now look at what at we have to deal with with the Web as it is today...
All they need is to make their own instance, and then get it big enough, and it'd be virtually no different than more traditional websites. Sure, anyone can make their own instances or communities, but without the hardware to prop up thousands to millions of users there's no way anyone could compete with a company-sponsored instance past a certain threshold of critical mass.
I don't know anything about it except for what you said, but yeah fuck them. I'd much rather donate my money (well, once I get a job that is) to a bunch of people to maintain a server and simply jump on another instance if anything weird happens than use another Meta's (or any other shitty corpo's) products
fuck that noise, absolutely do not federate with them
Just block them from federating and move on.
It's an easy fix. If an instance you're a part of federates with them then just move to a new instance.
Hopefully this will put instance blocking on the top of the list.
I think this is so interesting...
For a refreshing change, we have corporations coming to the users, not the other way around.
I'm deeply skeptical, but I'm glad communities and hubs have the power to block them outright.
Block them or I’m gone
Embrace, extend, extinguish
for anyone not familiar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found that was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
All instances should defederated with corporation instances ASAP
I'm excited to get some of my Facebook groups onto the fediverse,buyt still a wait and see approach makes the most sense before wholly endorsing this. Corps have a habit of "worst of all worlds" decisions tbh.
Facebook et al has had a horrible track record of creating a new app/service and getting people on board. Their 3 successes are Facebook, Whatsapp (bought), and IG (bought). Every time they've launched an app outside of these, they failed (IGTV anyone?).
The Fediverse is open.
They can create Threads on activity pub and hope that they can create a server that competes with Twitter. Go for it, who cares. You can choose to follow people there or not, or join or not, or be on a server that defederates from it or not.
That's the beauty of it.
Meta's userbase is diverse. It has good and bad players. No need to broadstrokes it. If people join the Fediverse via Threads, many will discover Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Calckey etc over time. Discovery & community!
So, like... in conclusion or whatever... everyone needs to chill. IMO.
I did my senior college paper on the fuckery that Facebook and Meta has caused and how harmful their data collection has been to American society. I will stop using any services that are bought up by Fuckerberg.
I do not want them in the fediverse and will not tolerate them for a second. The moment they form an instance is the moment I block their instance.
Fuck. Meta.
Mind sharing the TL;DR about your paper?
Stay the fuck away
Lmao want nothing to do with them. One of the reasons I’m here is to escape these dogshit corpos
It's the old Microsoft strategy again - Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
They deserve a good boot up the arse before they put one up our's.
People are being really hypocritical.
You want a free open source social network. But when people you dont like join it, you hate it. That is not how it works, its not how FREE in FOSS works.
Meta can join, they can do whatever they want. It literally the point of this social network. If you dont like it, then go to a social network that is not FOSS, but is heavily moderated, because that is what most of you really want.
"Freedom" can be used to justify lots of really bad stuff. Meta has too much money to be trusted, they WILL fuck the Fediverse up eventually for more profit on the first chance they get (and people with lots of money always get those chances).
And it's not just about morality and the fucked up stuff that's happened on Meta, Iike the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I stopped using Facebook years ago because of the low quality of the content being posted there. And last week I logged back in to sell some stuff and oh boy, the content managed to get even worse.
I don't want growth just for the sake of growth. We don't need big corporations getting involved.
Pros:
- my friends join
- larger community = more content
- meta funding would likely contribute to fediverse growth and improvements
- any instance can defederate them from said instance, which would mitigate almost every con
Cons:
- Meta is evil and wants all your information to profile you and sell to other companies for profit
Makes no difference to me. Those who believe they have privacy just because Meta and others don't yet have their own instance are mistaken.
I don't believe at all that I have any privacy on the internet. As someone in the US, I pretty much assumed I lost that when Bush signed the Patriot Act. My dislike of Meta joining has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with their love of destroying good things for the sake of profit. I have no desire for yet another thing to become a corporate bullshit farm. This is honestly my last resort. If the fediverse is dismantled for profit, I'll just stop any type of social media whatsoever. It's not worth it to me.
I'm trying to think about how they could ruin the fediverse but can't think of anything. If they contribute to the code, it must be open source. So it's either shit and isn't included/no one adopts their changes or it's actually good and makes a better service.
I agree with you on the privacy front - if they want to gobble up data, they can do that now without their own instance. If LLMs want to scrape the fediverse for data there's no stopping them either.
There's plenty of "I want nothing to do with them" here in the post but I'm not really understanding the risk. This isn't an approval of Meta as a company - I just want to understand what people believe the risk is.
I view them embracing federation as a good thing.
I also view it as important for the instances I wish to follow to never federate with them.
But is it even possible for a mega corporation to embrace federation? Isn't that essentially a contradiction in terms?
Screw meta.
News story I looked up. Fuck Meta and all the other money-sucking bastards that want to commodify every breath I take.
https://fediversereport.com/meta-plans-on-joining-the-fediverse-the-responses/
Meta is more likely to pull people away from Twitter than Mastodon is, and having all of Twitter be run with ActivityPub / open to federation is a good thing.
I think we should let them consume Fediverse content but not create it.
If Meta proposes to let Instagram users follow people on Mastodon or whatever, that seems like a reasonable compromise - they get to keep people on their feeds viewing ads and we get more reach - but they shouldn't have the power to leave and take a large % of Fediverse content with them; if you want to make a post, you need to do so from a non-Meta-controlled instance in a non-Meta-controlled app.
My problem with that is then the fediverse doesn't grow, meta controls the largest instance, and they make money off any posts that go viral here. I have to disagree for those reasons.