The Social Web Foundation (SWF) is a new non-profit with a mission of "a growing, healthy, financially viable and multi-polar Fediverse”. In TechCrunch, Sarah Perez reported that SWF has “some backing” from Meta as well as Flipboard, Ghost, Mastodon, and others as well as a “large grant” from the Ford Foundation. “In total, SWF is closing in on $1 million in financial support.”
One of the hot buttons in the discussion is SWF’s relationship with Meta. So I set up a series of polls on Mastodon. Here are the options for this one – I’m not sure how to do polls on Lemmy, so please leave your thoughts in the comments
- SWF shouldn’t engage with Meta at all
- SWF should work with Meta occasionally, when it’s necessary
- SWF should work with Meta together often, but no formal relationship
- SWF should have Meta as a partner, advisor, or some other formal relatoinship, but no funding
- SWF should take funding from Meta, but no formal relationship
- SWF should take funding from Meta and a formal relatiionship
I’m totally fine with the SWF engaging with Meta just like they would any other entity building software using ActivityPub.
Funding on the other hand is a different story. It sounds like Meta contributed to an overall fund in order to launch the SWF. OK, I suppose — but if there’s specific funding down the road for some specific project or funding in some way which appears to influence decision-making on which projects to work on or how to approach them, that’s when I have a huge problem with it.
Agreed that there’s a difference between funding and other kinds of engagement – and a difference between initial funding to get them off the ground. Right now it’s not exactly clear what funding Meta’s contributed and what the longer-term plans are. One of the other polls in the thread was about transparency, and (at least so far) 90% of the respondents are saying that SWF should be transparent about the funding it’s getting from Meta. And, another poll zeroes in on funding and has different options for initial and up-front, and whether or not there are any strings attached.
They don’t “need” the SWF. If Zuckerberg wanted to simply takeover the control of ActivityPub, they could just use their existing devrel people that work with the W3C and push the changes directly at the “authoritative” organization.
Gah, don’t give them ideas! 😨
My point is that we should take their current approach as a good thing.
I"m not saying that we should blindly trust them, but I am saying that if we want corporations to Do The Right Things, then it’s a lot better to let them have a seat at the table and participate with the community than to simply ostracize them forever because of their past wrongdoings.