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So, recently some fediverse admins (mostly Mastodon) and the founder of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko (Gargron), where contacted by Meta/Facebook for an NDA meeting. We know nothing about it, but we're pretty sure that it was about this project92 thing that Meta/Facebook is creating to "compete" with Twitter.
So a lot of Mastodon admins already singed a pact to immediately block any Meta/Facebook activity in the fediverse as soon as it comes up. My Mastodon instance, fosstodon.org hasn't singed that pact and I'm pretty worried.
The following image is an screenshot of Gargron and dansup (creator of Pixelfed) talking about this. These posts were deleted, even from the wayback machine.
Facebook's algo drives interaction, human interaction with this content amplifies this content, just like pretty much every other algorithm. Ragebait sells unfortunately, but this isn't anything new. Seen any news channel since the 24 hour news cycle was introduced?
This is a response to "everything Meta touches turns to shit". WhatsApp is a fine example.
No, because it wasn't a priority when Messenger was built in 2011 lol. Don't rewrite history with what you know today, I don't know if you remember the internet back then, but it was the wild west. Data privacy was not a concern to many.
This one is more subjective, because to avoid the tracking you can just not use Facebook. If they don't have your personal information they aren't tracking you, they only know some person somewhere interactioned on a site that has Facebook Pixel. They don't even collect your IP address, hence why they use cookies for tracking here.
Not to mention this is all to sell targeted ads, so "evil" would be dramatic imo. Just a company doing what a company does.
This isn't true until actual proof is provided.
Also subjective, just don't use Facebook if you believe this to be the case. Their ML models don't care about you if it can't target you with ads.
"Meta is evil" is what I was discussing. Sociopathic sure, just like every profit driven corporation, but to change this we'd need to unwind our society from profit driven entirely, which I'm all for, but that's a whole other conversation.
I'm just really hoping that this place doesn't get obsessed with Facebook ragebait like Reddit did.
Facebook's algo is a deliberate choice. If the only problem was with what the humans who use the service did, why doesn't reddit, tumblr, instagram, or previous to Elon, twitter have the same level of drivel constantly circulating their top posts? On other corner of the internet, trolls like Dan Bongino don't get any real traction because they don't hold any views that most people actually have. On FB, at least around the last time I cared about looking, 5-8 of the top 10 posters on FB would be extremely niche on any other social media sites, and should be even more niche on facebook since they represent an extremely tiny piece of the real world and facebook has a far larger sample size than just about any other company.
Also, re: messenger encryption and not looking back with hindsight, another messaging app also came out in 2011 with E2E - iMessage. WhatsApp added support for E2E in August of 2012. Why did it take facebook so long?
On Facebook's nefarious practices creating your social graph - I deleted my facebook account in like 2016. During the pandemic I, admiittedly, compromised my moral position on facebook and created an account to use marketplace. How, without me telling Facebook just about any real info, do you surmise they were able to suggest to me people I know IRL that I didn't even know when I had a facebook account previously, while also using mostly fake info (slightly changed name, I think the only thing I used was my phone number and even that had changed since I'd previously used FB.)
Re: photos and "just don't use facebook." There is not really a way in modern society to really do that. I upload nothing to FB, but it's already extremely difficult to not get people you know not to include you in pictures uploaded to social media, and tbh I don't try because it's just the default for most people these days, much less people you don't know or don't know well.
I don't think discussion of Meta as a company can really go too far without turning into ragebait, and deservedly so. They're basically the Ma Bell of the modern age, we just don't have regulators with the stones to do anything about it these days.