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.
true. but don’t forget that when these things were new, they came kicking and screaming. think of how many people retired during the PC/internet boom just so they wouldn’t have to deal with it all at work. the entire world changed and made websites/email a necessity to exist and survive. i don’t really see a minor flavor of tech like microblogging following that path. people will have an option between “easy and closed source” and “mildly just a little technical but with freedom” and will choose to go with whatever is easy.
Apple was also federated with iChat/iMessage. I believe iMessage still to this day is XMPP based.
Ack. I just said almost the same thing before I read your comment.
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.
‘What a lovely Nope you have going on there.’
I see.
They are free to set up an instance. Not sure who would federate with them.
Most Based answer.
Bribes
My feeling about Meta joining the Fediverse is: 🚨DANGER!🚨
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.
About your first point, I’ve heard that Wikipedia is actually very wealthy and doesn’t need the money. They essentially run a scam every year asking for more.
I don’t understand why everyone freaks out that wikipedia tries to keep a reserve. Yes, they have enough money on hand to run for a few years… Is that really such a bad thing? Why does everyone think nonprofits should be scrimping by before they do their next donation campaign?
To me, keeping a reserve fund just seems like good money management, and I’d rather donate to an organization that manages their money well than one that doesn’t. If there were problems with a large chunk of donations not going to wikipedia upkeep it would be different, but as far as I can tell all of the controversy is just over the fact that they have a reserve at all
The biggest problem is the fact they beg for donations and the wording makes it seem like they are about to shut down unless you donate right now. They are disingenuous.
No one said having reserve funds is bad. Just don’t act like you’re about to shut down Wikipedia to get more money when you literally have millions in reserve. It’s scummy.
imagine if wikipedia actually shut down. I dont fault them any precaution as long as it doesnt cause actual harm. Though if they just keep doing that even though they have money for tens of years in reserve then that starts getting a bit suspicious.
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
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.
Fuuuuuck no! This isn’t actually happening right? This is just an idea I hope?
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
I guess I’ll just go back to reading books and watching movies full time.
Fuck all of those tech giants.
It’ll be near impossible for them to destroy the fediverse thankfully
You could watch Foundation on Apple+…oh…
Yarr
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.
Is that necessary though? I feel like we should let them join. If they do something malicious, then we can block them. IMO, it doesn’t make sense to just preemptively block them for no real reason.
They’ve demontrated their evil nature in the past, promoting divisive and inciteful material and anything to drive engagement for the sake of advertiser dollars. I don’t think we need to wait for them to do it again in the Fediverse. Better to head that shit off right up front.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Microsoft did it before, we shouldn’t let Meta do it now.
It is wholly necessary. They will start massive data mining operations if they join, harming users of all instances.
Data mining can happen without any of that, everything you post in the fediverse is literally available for anyone to see. Realistically, the most harm they can do is build controlled communities that grow so huge that they drown out all of the fediverse’s open communities.
Look at what happened with Google Chrome and browser standards. We don’t want a company that dominates the landscape changing the rules in their favour.
Your most harm scenario is exactly what they want to do.
Yeah, it is. And I’m not saying that’s not a valid reason to resist companies in the fediverse, it totally is. I’m just saying the privacy concerns everyone is mentioning don’t really make sense, anything they could get, everyone already has
Yeah I kind of roll my eyes about it too. “Things you delete are there forever” - that’s literally how the internet has always worked. It’s like when people found out their snap chats and Instagram stories could be seen by anyone who worked at the companies…like fucking obviously, they DEVELOPED the app and host all the content?!
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.
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.
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.
