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.
EU should hurry up with their federation laws.
What do you mean?
Holy shit! Had no idea! Thanks, mate.
Common EU WThe EU really are the protectors of the free and open internet. Given the Republicans would kill any attempts to pass any regulations here in the States, we’re basically reliant on the EU to save us. So thanks, guys :)
I like the EU as much as the next guy, but you can’t tell the whole story without mentioning this disaster.
you can still use XMPP. i use it, my family uses it.
hate facebook all you want (i certainly do) but dont act like normies would be living in a federated utopia without them. theyd be on whatever is closed source with the most number of people and the most advertising dollars behind it and the simplest user experience. normies like easy, and its hard to blame them.
Yes and no. Normies use federated systems too: Websites and email.
My feeling about Meta joining the Fediverse is: 🚨DANGER!🚨
Meta are doing WHAT‽
A federated reddit clone named threads.
‘What a lovely Nope you have going on there.’
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 are free to set up an instance. Not sure who would federate with them.
Bribes
They will datamine all federated users They will set up a CDN for uploads on their platform that will track you like v.meta.com or i.meta.com.
They will probably train LLMs off the data. They will sell the data to advertisers or data brokers. They will most likely have ads or pay to boost.
They will diverge from the standard once they have the majority of users like google does with chrome and the web.
They will set up a CDN for uploads on their platform that will track you like v.meta.com or i.meta.com.
This is the only thing they couldn’t already do. They’ve probably already been datamining Fediverse users. No need to set up an instance for that.
I agree with the v.meta.com and i.meta.com. We’ll have to establish some good alternatives by then so people don’t use them just because they work so well.
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
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.
Stay the fuck away
Meta is a corporation with a really horrible track record
and even if they didn’t, it’s still a corporation; it only cares for profit
I have very negative opinions on them joining
We would be opening the door to allow a large corporation to do what they’ve done with open source for a while. They’ll privatize the public commons.
But all this work [GPL licensing] was ridiculed. Microsoft, through Github, Google and Apple pushed for MIT/BSD licensed software as the open source standard. This allowed them to use open source components within their proprietary closed products. They managed to make thousands of free software developers work freely for them. And they even received praise because, sometimes, they would hire one of those developers (like it was a “favour” to the community while it is simply business-wise to hire smart people working on critical components of your infrastructure instead of letting them work for free). The whole Google Summer of Code, for which I was a mentor multiple years, is just a cheap way to get unpaid volunteers mentor their future free or cheap workforce.
Our freedoms were taken away by proprietary software which is mostly coded by ourselves. For free. We spent our free time developing, debugging, testing software before handing them to corporations that we rever, hoping to maybe get a job offer or a small sponsorship from them. Without Non-copyleft Open Source, there would be no proprietary MacOS, OSX nor Android. There would be no Facebook, no Amazon. We created all the components of Frankenstein’s creature and handed them to the evil professor.
This article is actually pretty great.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-19-more-rms.html
And for emphasis:
We created all the components of Frankenstein’s creature and handed them to the evil professor.
That’s a great piece - thanks!
Lmao want nothing to do with them. One of the reasons I’m here is to escape these dogshit corpos
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.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft did it before, we shouldn’t let Meta do it now.
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.
It is wholly necessary. They will start massive data mining operations if they join, harming users of all instances.
I don’t think I could disagree more. We value the fact that this tech can be scraped, API’d and redistributed. That’s kinda point and partial cause of the protesting going with Reddit at this moment. ???
We have abilities to block it ourselves. We want options and features to customize our personal experiences as we see fit. That’s what we are trying to build here.
Data mining can happen without any of that, everything you post in the fediverse is literally available for anyone to see. Realistically, the most harm they can do is build controlled communities that grow so huge that they drown out all of the fediverse’s open communities.
Your most harm scenario is exactly what they want to do.
Look at what happened with Google Chrome and browser standards. We don’t want a company that dominates the landscape changing the rules in their favour.
Nope. Just nope. It’ll be the death of the Fediverse.
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
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.
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
