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Yeah, that's gonna be a hard pass from me thanks, Rachel.
Zero interest in having a conversation with #Meta "off the record" or otherwise.
Sharing this purely to be as transparent as possible with our members.
The exchange is about Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
TL;DR (if you can’t be bothered reading all of the below) - Fosstodon will wait and see what happens, but if Facebook’s new service introduces any issues that could negatively impact our users, we will defederate.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Okay, if your community can’t survive Meta using ActivityPub, then it doesn’t deserve to exist.
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!
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.
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.
Meta is not going to “use” this technology, they want to own it. And you can be 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.
the masses pick their form of fediverse rather than the one not controlled by big tech.
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.
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!
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !technology@beehaw.org
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
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.
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.
They’re the type to freeze instead of fight or flight
Freezing would actually probably be better, in this case I think its fawn.
Meta isn’t as cute as predators in the wild.
I don’t think they “destroyed” Meta. Meta was polite and they were passive aggressive? What is there to celebrate?
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
deleted by creator
The 7th one will shock you!
Programmer DESTROYS Facebook rep and the internet can’t handle it!
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 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
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.
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.
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.
The concern is that they will attempt to “embrace, extend, and extinguish”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
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.
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 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.
Meta is not going to “use” this technology, they want to own it. And you can be 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.
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 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!
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 really hope that we’ll be able to maintain a strong resistance and fortification against Meta taking over the fediverse.
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.
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.
Think we are in good hand if this is by any indication. Lol
Only defense is to defederate meta and any instance that chooses to federate with meta
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.
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
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
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
Anywhere Meta goes ads will follow and privacy will flee.
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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 need meta to just stay away from the fediverse forever