I’m getting really tired of trying to run away from big tech, only to be ensnared again by the greed and/or naivety of sites who ultimately cave to the whims of big tech.
Mastodon has already caved, and the silence of lemmy’s and kbin’s developers over this matter isn’t exactly reassuring. Since I more or less still have my bags packed from leaving reddit, what are some other communities I could try that would be more resilient to corporate encroachment?
So Meta’s plan is to make a twitter-alike that spies on its users and manipulates them into being the hate fueled engagement engine, and then inflict that on the fediverse?
What’s to stop everyone from pointing out as often as possible that users can still talk to Zuck’s twits without the spying and manipulation by simply doing so from a non-Meta instance, and then defederating Meta once they are no longer dominant?
Am I just misunderstanding this?
So Meta’s plan is to make a twitter-alike that spies on its users and manipulates them into being the hate fueled engagement engine, and then inflict that on the fediverse?
No one outside their boardroom knows what Meta’s plan is, but I doubt they care much about fedi. They are trying to kill off Twitter and take that marketshare of ~500M users. The fediverse with a total of 9M users (and no advertising revenue) isn’t very important in that scheme.
They are in deep legal trouble with EU privacy regulations and need to show to EU they are “taking things seriously”. ActivityPub was most likely a nice “freebie” they can use and point out they offer interoperability. The whole fediverse bit is just to escape further GDPR trouble with EU.
What’s to stop everyone from pointing out as often as possible that users can still talk to Zuck’s twits without the spying and manipulation by simply doing so from a non-Meta instance, and then defederating Meta once they are no longer dominant?
I’m not sure I understand what you mean? That people would migrate away from Threads if they knew they only knew can access their followers from somewhere else? Why on earth would that ever happen? The opposite is more likely.
Am I just misunderstanding this?
Yes?
That’s an interesting angle that I completely failed to notice. I thought this whole experiment is for Facebook/Meta to get a headstart in a new tech space, like they’re been trying to do with VR and the whole crypto craze.
While I never assumed their intentions were pure with any of this, I clearly was not nearly as cynical as one has to be with these people.
What’s to stop everyone from pointing out as often as possible that users can still talk to Zuck’s twits without the spying and manipulation by simply doing so from a non-Meta instance
Facebook users are stupid, network effects ensure that most people go to a single provider and then minor incompatibilities between threads and the fediverse slowly cuts off the fediverse and ensures it dies.
What does “dies” mean in this circumstance? We already only have 1% of their users. Are we afraid that access toore content here will cause users to leave for Facebook?
Dies means activity slows to the point that the site isn’t worth using. It’s not dead right now for example. I have people to talk to.
Given the fediverse is pretty open by design, meta doesn’t even need to be part of it to spy if they wanted. It’s the EEE strategy that people are more worried about.
Given the fediverse is pretty open by design, meta doesn’t even need to be part of it to spy if they wanted.
They can’t gather all the same information that they could from a phone app, and we’ve seen what permissions they ask for on that. They also can’t manipulate the feed to drive engagement by fostering hate like they can with their own site/app.
It’s the EEE strategy that people are more worried about.
Hence the “get them off meta and onto other instances and then defederate” thing.