More worrying than that, when directly asked about this by the "Mastodon Migration" user, Rochko's answer was not "I did not sign any NDA", no "I have not met with them", no "I have not heard any proposal from FB", no "I haven't signed any documents", and sure as fuck no "I'm not considering selling out and betraying you all", no, he said just "I am not aware of any secret deals with Meta".
That's a textbook application of the Suspiciously Specific Denial trope.
We have to assume he met with them, signed the NDA and is seriously considering whatever they're proposing, and there's rumors that they're gonna pay money to any participant servers, that would make them effectively vassals of Meta.
My guess is, that Meta will try to control the public image of the name Mastodon. Yeah the Software itself is OpenSource and protected under AGPL-3, but they still can buy Mastodon GmbH and use that to tie their name to Mastodon for the broad public.
Well shit. I thought this might happen. I mean it‘s only a talk for now, but I suspect further that there will be some sort of money offer in an effort to start the "embrace" part of embrace, extend, extinguish and with the NDA we won‘t know if he took the money or not.
So for those who care about not embracing Meta, it‘s the canary in the coal mine. I‘ll switch to one of my safer Lemmy instances now I suppose before I get too attached to this one, see y‘all around under my new identity.
From his own comment, he's signing the NDA because it's the only way to find out what Meta want, and he figures knowing is better than not knowing. At no point has he indicated that he's going to work with them at all, and an NDA doesn't give them control or any guarantee of cooperation.
£5 says he comes back and says "I can't discuss details because of the NDA, but... no" and it goes no further.
I'm genuinely confused why so many people are reacting so quickly to this news like it's the end of Mastodon. We can't conclude anything just by virtue of the fact that he signed an NDA. We don't know the terms of the NDA. It could simply be that he can't talk about Meta's specific plans.
More to the point, as the originator of the network and the one in charge of the source code, I feel like it's his responsibility to be informed of what companies like Meta are planning to do. If an NDA is the price of admission to that knowledge, and provided that the terms aren't egregious, he should go.
This just got really, really ugly.
Eugen is proof that the fediverse requires distributed (not just decentralized) ownership.
Related: https://beehaw.org/post/715934
Aral Balkan has been posting about surveillance capitalism/centralised networks and corpotate landgrabs for years and said this the other day
🤦♂️
I personally think it's a bad idea, but I will try to judge the action instead of the person given how dedicated he likely is to the fediverse in general
I bet his instances will be one of the few actually federating with them 😔
If Meta is interested in joining an open platform based on open-source API standards then why not open meetings Does anyone wonder if Rochko would sell the Mastodon Foundation to Meta
