The exchange is about Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
A 45 minute “round table” with multiple rando masto instance admins? That doesn’t sound like enough time for the table to get very round.
It sounds more like 5 minutes introduction, 30 minute presentation by Meta, 10 minutes Q&A. But oops our presentation ran just a bit long, and I really do have a hard stop at noon so we really only have about 5 minutes for questions thanks for all of the valuable feedback we’ll be sure to circle back offline.
Ah, I see you’ve taken part in Bullshit Corporate Meetings™ before!
a true person of culture!
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.
This conversation will be off the record, as the team may discuss confidential details that should not be discussed with others
Translation: Nobody needs to know how much money we offer you as a bribe.
My guess is that anyone attending will have to sign an NDA. That will make it hard to speak out against Meta joining the federation. If someone does say anything, the Meta lawyers will destroy them.
They did with the last one. That’s why there’s so much distrust about it.
Do you have a link? I’d like to know that sorry too.
Anywhere Meta goes ads will follow and privacy will flee.
What an absolute legend. Also, I do so solemnly swear that any instance caught federating with meta is going straight in my hosts file.
You have been warned.
share the list, I’ll add them to my pihole!
I am looking for a new instance because my admin is on the fence.
Oh look, a tough guy behind his keyboard.
So you will block Fosstodon?
That statement is refreshingly sane. Really sick of the amount of heat over this situation and the lack of light.
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).
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!
Because tons of Lemmy/Kbin users are still addicted to Facebook/Instagram. They’ll defend their drug dealer to the death.
I need meta to just stay away from the fediverse forever
A good response. Civlised and to-the-point.
I disagree.
I hope there’ll be people discussing sensibly.
For example the question how the rest of the fediverse would like Meta to act, when / if they have the by far largest instance on Fediverse with Threads.
Should they Rate-Limit queries from their users to other Instances, as to not overload them? This would protect other instances, but make the federated experience worse, driving more people to threads.
Would the Fediverse rather that Meta mirrors images etc on their servers too, or pull those from the original server?
Maybe they have UX ideas that would be useful to have somewhat uniform (like the subreddit/community/magazine stuff here), and would like input on them.Of course just blocking them is an option for the fediverse, but doing that blindly seems like a missed opportunity for both sides.
More freely available content would be great, wouldn’t it?Maybe they have Ideas on the protocol, that they want to talk with admins about as a first step to gain more perspective. And certainly they are likely to be data-hungry greedy shit, but there is a chance that they are actually good ideas - there are actual people working at meta after all.
There’s tons of ways in which this could be useful, and I don’t really understand the completely blocking approach I see a lot of.
They want to use ActivityPub, that’s awesome, finally something new and big that uses an open freaking standard on the web. What are the downsides? If it sucks for communities they can easily block Meta.
Yes, Meta is not a Company working for the betterment of the world, certainly.
But maybe, just maybe, goals align here, and Meta can make money and improve the Fediverse and the Internet with it. And certainly, maybe they want to “take over” ActivityPub, and that would indeed be bad. And even then, wouldn’t knowing because they told you be much better than knowing because they’re meta?
So, if they want to change the Protocol, be very, very wary of their proposals. But even there there they could just want reasonable improvements because they suddenly deal with 100x of the next biggest instances.tl;dr: when you tell people what you’d like them to do, it increases the chances of them doing that.
Yeah large EEE on ActivityPub feels like almost a given if they start to use it.
But should you block people from embracing a good thing, just because you’re scared they’ll try to extend and extinguish?
no one is preventing people who have facebook or instagram accounts from joining the fediverse by blocking meta. what they are doing, is preemptively taking action to ensure an immoral company doesn’t do exactly what it has shown itself to be in it’s nature to do.
Fuck Meta and all they stand for.
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.
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.
I find it a tad amusing that this news about Facebook’s latest attempt at fucking over the Fediverse is where I hear about the pixelfed project for the first time.
I don’t think they “destroyed” Meta. Meta was polite and they were passive aggressive? What is there to celebrate?
Meta is going for a price run on failure it feels like, I worked for a company bought out by (no names to prevent breaking my NDA) them super publically and then a year or so later firing 90% of the staff and replacing them (for no reason) and leaving a skeleton crew.
And as expected things have just been on a steady decline ever since. The people running the show at Meta have to be off their rocks on coke.
They just wanted your former company to not exist anymore. That’s what they do: see competition and eat it.
That’s the thing though, it’s still around and getting marketed by them as one of their major products. So they’re beating a dead horse that they shot to death themself really.
Beating an astral dead horse rather than a corpse
Personally, I’m not planning on using the Meta service, but I’m not a fan of pre-emptive defederation either. The vast majority of P92 users will have 0 clue what federation/activitypub is, let alone actually log into Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin, etc. For them, they will forever think of themselves as @username, not @username.
I’m totally fine with Meta releasing an app who’s posts are exposed via ActivityPub, along with being able to consume other posts via ActivityPub. If anything, I would like to think it’ll drive more people off the Meta platform and into Mastodon, as moving to a federated app doesn’t mean they have to completely break connections with their network on-platform with Meta.
Overall, I’m more in favour of allowing a personal user to choose to defederate from specific instances, because regardless of what happens, if Meta joins, there will be other companies getting on the bandwagon, and endlessly splitting up based of which instances federate with which others will eventually lead to the whole damn thing falling apart and the big players becoming the de-jure instances anyways.
I mean, the vast majority of Lemmy/Kbin users migrated from Reddit, as did the vast majority of Mastodon users from Twitter. I’m fine with keeping things open to help facilitate more user growth to community run instances, while also having a place for the less tech-savvy to get their feet wet.
The vast majority of P92 users will have 0 clue what federation/activitypub is, let alone actually log into Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin, etc. For them, they will forever think of themselves as
@username, not@username@meta.com.There’s an argument to be made that that’s exactly why everyone else should defederate preemptively.
Exactly. I know it’s a bit elitist, but I just don’t care what meta users have to say about anything. If you’re dumb enough to participate in their little data extraction operations then I don’t want to know you.
“These dumb fucks keep giving me their data” - Zuckerberg
My thoughts are similar to yours, I don’t think instances should be defederating unless there’s a serious issue with the content of another instance.
Good instances should be winning over people by being better than whatever Facebook’s ad ridden, algorithm driven, instance ends up being.
I mean worst case you’ll see @meta.com accounts in your Federated feed in Mastodon (which for pretty much every instance is already a complete mess), I don’t even really see how it’ll affect Lemmy or Kbin, as they’re community driven rather than user driven. I follow users with Mastodon, I follow communities with Kbin.
I dunno, maybe I’m being necessarily optimistic, but I do have friends and family who are posting on Insta/FB, and I basically maintain an account there to keep up with them. I’d love to be able to keep that connection without having to actually be locked into Meta’s platforms. And I do think at least a few of my tech savvy friends would be willing to give a client like Ivory a go if they’re able to do the same.
Their idea is likely to eventually present themselves as the “better part of the network” and make migrating to their servers very easy.
This must be prevented at all costs.
I was talking about this with someone here the other day, and this seems like the logical direction for them. They’ll create a cloud of instances that users are able to utilize and create their own communities with relative ease compared to compiling the code and doing the base level software management, and also develop Meta-specific featuresets on those servers to lock people onto their platform. Oh, you want to break away from us and manage your own instance? Have fun doing it the hard way, and without features XYZ that are only available from us!
That is not the worst case, by a long shot
And you’re not just being optimistic, you’re being naive
Since you clearly didn’t read the article the commenter linked I’ll sum up the important point:
Corporations routinely infiltrate and integrate with open source in order to destroy it.
Meta will implement federation, then they will “extend” the specification with a bunch of new features that the other places of the fediverse can’t put out as fast, making anyone talking to a meta user at a disadvantage, just like how Apple calls out non-iMessage participants in a group text.
They’ll also likely implement a different specification than they publish, so that anyone implementing the meta features fails due to bad instructions
It’s been done multiple times before, for decades
Ffs, I’m just waiting for Microsoft to start pulling shit with the Linux foundation now that they have majority seats
these corporations are not your friends, they are not on your side, they don’t even see you as slaves, you are livestock
I’m just waiting for Microsoft to start pulling shit with the Linux foundation now that they have majority seats
A majority?! Fucking hell!
Using the iMessage analogy, we’re currently in a state where green bubbles can’t interact with blue bubbles at all. Nobody should be expecting full interop with a corporate platform, but for the long run I’d rather have partial interop at arms length.
Embrace extend extinguish only applies if platform is so focused that it cannot sustain itself without the extend phase, and the extend phase cannot happen without something to embrace.
I think this is the logical pragmatic take. They’ll start on day 1 with more users than the entirety of the fediverse. Defederating just allows them to ignore us and pretend they own the fediverse. We should at least try to win over those users and prevent FB adware software overtaking Mastodon as the dominant fediverse platform.
I don’t understand why people think the end goal should be one network of Fediverse instances connected to each other. We already don’t have that and never will.
Meta adding “more users than the entirety of the Fediverse” is irrelevant. They already have more users and content from Facebook, Instagram or whatever else Meta owns is not showing up on my Lemmy or Kbin front page. How would I notice any difference if the tech behind Meta’s services is different?
If Meta wants a platform that’s larger than anything else they already have Facebook.
The one and only reason Meta’s looking at the fediverse is to scrape it for content. It’s social content they risk being left out of and they want in. It’s as simple as that.
Federate with their instances and they will scrape the shit out of yours, build shadow profiles around your users, feed all your posts and comments into their LLM, cross reference them with their Facebook data to figure out everybody’s real identity, and so on and so forth.
Nope
This is how they destroy competition that they can’t buy out.
Microsoft did it with office, intell did it to amd
Their network can’t survive a competitor, they depend on no other option existing
Guaranteed this is about disrupting and controlling the federated network
I like to think they see the rapid growth as an opportunity to grab some Reddit refugees. I’m not sure they see the Fediverse as a viable threat YET. They could hedge it though and try to snuff it out while they still can.
along with being able to consume other posts via ActivityPub
I read a new article that said it remains to be seen whether P92 will allow users to see posts from other site (they’ll broadcast to ActivityPub but undecided about displaying contents from federated servers): https://tech.co/news/meta-decentralized-social-media
A source close to the project also told MoneyControl that “the plan as of now is that the MVP (minimum viable product) will definitely allow our users to broadcast posts to people on other servers”, but admitted the company is yet to decide whether to allow users “to follow and view the content of people on other servers.”
If they only broadcast, but not displaying contents from other servers or allow their users to follow people from other server, then what’s the point of adding federated support if people from other servers can’t interact with them?
Indeed, what is the point? It may be as simple as them trying to coopt the movement to get ahead of it and steal mindshare. Think Hitler and the intentional naming of “National Socialism”.
“Oh, ActivityPub is the hot new thing, let’s check it out,” says clueless user #39,728 as they click on the first link in their Google search, which coincidentally now happens to be Facebook.
This doesn’t surprise me. The idea then might be to allow for people outside of their walled garden to follow (likely for big name accounts, celebrities, athletes, important people) etc, but not really be a true federated instance. In which case, I think defederating is even more pointless. Just let users on an instance follow who they want to follow.
At least here, if you’re not a fan of de/federation practice, it’s minimal work to change servers.
I’m not excited at the idea of my posts on another service entirely getting shipped off to a meta server for them to reconstruct my network through that activity. It’s the same issue of as their shadow profiles, where meta knows who you and who you know by watching the posts your mom makes on FB.
Some of this is inevitable, I know, but I’m at least here for adding more barriers to privacy theft.
I do not believe that ‘celebrities’ and athletes are important people at all.
They are important to capitalism. Not us.
https://thefreeonline.com/2015/10/20/capitalism-is-unnatural/
A study by the Common Cause Foundation, due to be published next month, reveals two transformative findings. The first is that a large majority of the 1000 people they surveyed – 74% – identify more strongly with unselfish values than with selfish values. This means that they are more interested in helpfulness, honesty, forgiveness and justice than in money, fame, status and power. The second is that a similar majority – 78% – believes others to be more selfish than they really are. In other words, we have made a terrible mistake about other people’s minds.
The revelation that humanity’s dominant characteristic is, er, humanity will come as no surprise to those who have followed recent developments in behavioural and social sciences. People, these findings suggest, are basically and inherently nice.
…
So why do we retain such a dim view of human nature? Partly, perhaps, for historical reasons…
Another problem is that – almost by definition – many of those who dominate public life have a peculiar fixation on fame, money and power. Their extreme self-centredness places them in a small minority, but, because we see them everywhere, we assume that they are representative of humanity.
The media worships wealth and power, and sometimes launches furious attacks on people who behave altruistically. In the Daily Mail last month, Richard Littlejohn described Yvette Cooper’s decision to open her home to refugees as proof that “noisy emoting has replaced quiet intelligence” (quiet intelligence being one of his defining qualities). “It’s all about political opportunism and humanitarian posturing,” he theorised, before boasting that he doesn’t “give a damn” about the suffering of people fleeing Syria. I note with interest the platform given to people who speak and write as if they are psychopaths.
…
Misanthropy grants a free pass to the grasping, power-mad minority who tend to dominate our political systems. If only we knew how unusual they are, we might be more inclined to shun them and seek better leaders. It contributes to the real danger we confront: not a general selfishness, but a general passivity. Billions of decent people tut and shake their heads as the world burns, immobilised by the conviction that no one else cares.
Most people who use social media disagree, and unfortunately for you, it’s their opinions that matter most as to whether they use a given social media platform.
I don’t really care to follow celebrities and athletes either, but I recognise at least that I am in a minority.
Oh I’m very much aware that the majority are not people that I want to interact with. That’s why I find this whole situation so ridiculous. This community could stay it’s current size and activity level and I’d be overjoyed with it.
Once you invite the majority to any platform, it’s ruined. The choice is quite clear to me. Meta have shown quite clearly who they are and what they are interested in. Any idiot left on their platforms at this point is not someone I care to interact with. I’m not sure why there’s any interest at all in what they have to say.
You’re not wrong, and while I certainly agree, that’s a minority opinion to the vast majority of the population.
XMPP suffered a lot from what Google and Facebook did to it, so I understand people’s fears regarding Meta’s take on ActivityPub.
It’s more than justified
Especially with their patent moves, this is a malicious attack on the network
