They’ll make a bespoke federated service, collect all the data of their users (and all the people on other networks their users interact with), make it all shiny and fancy and add a ton of improvements most networks don’t have yet. And if they can reach a critical mass of users, they can track a huge cross section of federated activity, and force networks to play by their rules or lose access to their entire userbase. It’s the same thing google did to email.
Um, isn’t everything everyone does on the fediverse public? I assume it’s all being tracked already. By search engines as a bare minimum, but anyone else (including Meta) who does any kind of research/etc. And they don’t need to be federated to do it, they can just crawl the network with HTTP.
As for “forcing networks to play by their rules” I don’t see that happening, and Google hasn’t done it with email. Gmail doesn’t have enough marketshare for that. At best they’ve forced people to make sure they have good outbound spam filtering. That’s not just google, every email provider (including small on premise office mail servers) has that policy.
I’m not saying we should federate them (personally I’m undecided) but your explanation hasn’t convinced me.
Instance owners (can) see way more info about you. A rando scraping public posts can’t tell what device a user is connecting from, what posts they’re looking at and for how long, where to most effectively inject ads, and then correlate all that with gps and sound recordings they collect via their app they’ve convinced people to install.
The social media part of social media apps has always been the secondary feature. Something like 90% of users lurk anyway, the only way they’re getting data on lurkers is a man-in-the-middle attack.
Also, Gmail is very strong in the email space. It doesn’t matter whether your server ever sends a single piece of spam, Gmail has a history of throttling mail servers’ ability to send to Gmail accounts.
Facebook will never know any of that about me, since I won’t ever sign up for their instance.
I’m not sure blocking Meta is worthwhile in the long term. Say what you will about email, you still have some degree of choice over your host. I want better for the fediverse, but that’s still a marked improvement over mainstream social media.
In the short term, Meta wants to kill Twitter by collecting all its A-level users. I think this would be good for the fediverse, these are news outlets and poltiicians and etc making posts most people want the option to see in their feed. These are also users who want no-fuss platforms with some amount of “customer service”, and mastodon.social is simply not ready to provide that.
The issues it poses to re-centralization are an inevitable threat as the Fediverse grows. Unless there is a concrete plan to build protections and this is a stop-gap effort, I’m not yet convinced it’s worthwhile.
I think people are a bit confused about how this supposed “embrace, extend, and extinguish” thing is supposed to work, as well as how the proposed pushback is supposed to work and even how federation is supposed to work.
As others say, tracking is trivial and doesn’t require federation. “Losing access to their userbase” is what’s being proposed here as a solution, not a threat. And last I checked Google did not “extinguish” email and nobody using other email providers lost access to Gmail users.
I think people are reacting to “Meta bad” and assuming “anti-Meta good” without having a good grasp of why or how those things are supposed to function.
To the email point, it’s actually much more difficult to set up your own email than it used to be, exactly because google servers will not accept email from unknown providers that don’t meet their own standards. It didn’t extinguish email, true, but it did help centralize it around a handful of providers that can keep up to date with google’s whims to get reliable deliverability.
Come on, we’re going to pretend that there aren’t legitimate reasons for that beyond an alleged takeover of email by Google? It’s like the memetic XMPP example, fallacious twice over. Not only have netiher XMPP nor email been “extinguished”, but a lot of the effects people have noticed are atributable to other elements beyond Google’s intervention.
In this case if you’re going to assume incoming email filters are “Google’s whims” and not the fact that email as a whole exists solely for in-company communication and spam I’m gonna say your read on the situation is at least a little bit disingenuous.
