Since news leaked out 2 days ago that Facebook has approached Mastodon developers and admins - requiring non-disclosure agreements first - the whole microverse (i.e. mastodon / pleroma etc, the micro-blogging part of fedi) has been talking about nothing but that and Facebook’s imminent entry into the fediverse with an as yet not clearly defined entity called Barcelona or p92. This woud be very roughly comparable to Reddit saying they are going to federate with lemmy.
Yet here on lemmy I could only find a relatively small discussion.
https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/62958
Did the lemmyverse not know or just not care that much?
I think meta is deliberately trying to fly under the radar until it too late. Several fedi communities have signed a ‘pledge’ saying they will actively block meta fedi content from their servers. (Similar to what most are already doing with Truth Social which is just another mastodon instance).
Truth.social was actually never part of the Fediverse. It does use AcitivtyPub, but it doesn’t federate with other instances: https://pocketnow.com/trump-truth-social-network-removes-most-freedom-friendly-features-fediverse/
I’ll be honest, part of the reason I didn’t come to the Fediverse earlier was I knew that Truth Social was “on” Mastodon. That discouraged me from investigating anything about it. When Reddit forced my hand and I looked into it further, I realized that avoiding the whole space because Truth Social ran on it was as absurd as avoiding the Internet because Fox News has a website.
If I’m not mistaken, I think Gab and Parler were also just re-branded ActivityPub Free Software (which sucks, but changing the license to prevent bad actors from using it would make it un-Free and therefore the cure would be worse than the disease). It just goes to show how those hypocrites are happy to claim to be superior in their rugged individualism, but actually just take from others instead of accomplishing anything themselves.
I have no desire to interact with Facebook via Lemmy. Fuck that idea. And I think it’s shady that there’s Mastodon admins having secret meetings with Fuckerberg and his cronies and keeping the details secret. I think it’s even worse to see Mastodon servers defederating with other servers just because their admins are critical of Meta. I feel bad for all the users who fled to Mastodon just to get away from Big Corporate Social Media just to be shushed and have their concerns handwaved by their Admin who seems bizarrely starstruck. It all leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
I think there’s probably a reasonable explanation for this. The entire idea of Mastodon was built around getting away from companies like Meta. The admins arent going to just do a 180 on that.
It’s more likely that Meta wants to do a similar thing as Truth Social and they are doing some consultation work. It would be good money and I don’t blame them for taking it.
Now that I think about it, Zuck does seem to have that effect on people. Does he actually have a mind-washing beam?
To give them the benefit of the doubt, having to sign an NDA doesn’t mean they actually get into bed with Meta.
If you catch me completely off-guard, or for example 10 minutes ago when I started reading the thread, I definitely would give a hot-headed “hell no, fuck you Fuckerberg” response to any approach from Meta, but now that I’ve had the time to calmly think and see other people’s responses I have a better idea (which follows the benefit of the doubt train of though I mentioned).
Sure, the NDA ties your hands, but only until Meta makes the stuff they are scheming public. If federation is part of it, once they federate it would become public knowledge anyway. I’ll admit it’s not a large group of people who would be signing the NDA and sitting down with Meta, but that group of people now has advanced warning of anything Meta is planning and they can begin to counter plan, which is better than being caught totally off guard when Fuckerberg exposes himself.
If they do lie in bed (and federate) with Meta rather than use it as an opportunity to gain Intel on Meta’s horrid schemes, then sure, they will have chosen that side. If they just take Meta’s money and ultimately it helps the fediverse, or just use it to gain Intel, then no harm, no foul?
Btw for those curious, Meta/FB approaching Mastodon admins is related to their in-development Project92/Threads possible Twitter-successor/competitor.
As it says at the start of the article, the intent is integrate ActivityPub in it in some way. Concerns are being raised for a variety of understandable possibilities some have mentioned here, or sort of alluded to, such as the corporate practice of Embracing, Extending, and Extinguishing. An idea being that Facebook may only be adopting ActivityPub to in some way screw everyone else using it over.
There’s also the possibilities of questionable FB moderation practices permitting a flooding of linked instances with unmoderated FB garbage, scraping data (but since most of the fediverse stuff is public they…Don’t really need their own public app to do that), and so on.
Upvoted for mentioning EEE. Meta has been really active in facilitating progress in the opensource community lately with their work on LLAMA, so I’m not surprised to hear they are involved elsewhere.
Like much of big tech, they’ve been open sourcing software for years and EEE is a Microsoft playbook that was mainly used to target competitors, not open source software, from before Facebook even existed. People are parroting it because it’s a nice sounding alliteration, but it’s a false equivalence that does not apply because we can fork lemmy at any time.
“Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” might be difficult to make work with Free Software because it can be forked, but that doesn’t categorically exclude it from being a strategy companies can try. It’s still relevant to warn the community about.
sorry to be so direct, but if anyone is parroting anything, it’s you with the “they would never do that thing they always do, i’m super reasonable” position. EEE is literally covered in the first leaked Halloween document as a strategy to displace open standards.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents#Documents_I_and_II
this is a strategy microsoft has consistently used for years and continues to use to this day. hell, they are embracing and extending javascript right now with typescript.
Google successfully EEE the internet. They embraced chromium, extended such that they were the main (only) force that determines internet standads, now they extinguish all competition or obstacles in the ad space by setting the rules. This was done through free open source software.
undefined> does not apply because we can fork lemmy at any time.
Not to be a contrarian, but I feel this is a false claim here. After some time we will lose the mind share that gets people to switch over. People won’t switch from Messenger and WhatsApp to Telegram or Signal. At one point people are just too situated.
If it ends up bad for the overall environment of the fediverse, they’ll just get defederated. A lot of the folks on Mastadon are getting worked up because the identity of this corner of the internet is decidedly anti-corporate. The thing is, it’s just a few clicks for any instance-owner to completely isolate that project.
It could be a big deal (initially), or it could be a giant nothingburger. Or it could be a big deal that eventually turns into a nothingburger. Too soon to say, and way too soon to throw a fit over.
I’m all for anything that will provide an avenue for people to move off of corporate platforms. The average user doesn’t care, but for some of the more tech-savvy FB/Insta/WhatsApp users who join it could be an interesting way to get their feet wet and maybe look to move to alternate platforms without leaving their contact behind completely.
I’ve heard something about it, but I guess Lemmies have been too busy with Reddit and just building up Lemmy communities, so this flew under the radar.
And honestly yea, why should we care? If they wanna make an instance, nobody is stopping them, but I hope nobody will want to federate with them. We’ve had enough of corporate socials lately.
The shocking news this week was that a couple of admins of large Mastodon instances were talking with Meta (under NDA’s!), so it seems your hope (and mine) will be in vain.
It’s really going to be up to the users to push back should the admins get a payout to do something not in the communities interest.
Everyone is going to have to remain nimble and not rely on finding a permanent server until corporations get the message that this is a space that cannot be monetized in a capitalist way.
There is a risk that they start going the path of Microsoft’s “Embrace, extend, extinguish”. Although they probably wouldn’t call an isolated instance “Lemmy”, they could start as being federated. It might not even be obvious that it’s run by Facebook.
But once they have a stranglehold on users/communities, they can pitch themselves as the “most complete” portal to Lemmy. Even if they completely defederate, they would have the instance people want to be on
People are wayyyyy underestimating what a market cap the size of meta can buy you. Mainly, it can buy any feasible competitor or threat to your perpetual domination. Then you simply eat them.
It’s not that much different than how meta et al were trying to get tiktok banned on the guise of “security” when really they just didn’t want to have to compete with them. The arguments will look a little different, but the strategy is the same
