this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Presumably this is meant to avoid using Google Streetmaps? The concept of using something Facebook/Meta-owned instead of Google makes no sense to me in this context since Google is okay in terms of quality and shares all the major downsides with Facebook/Meta.
One big benefit of having street-level images is that it makes mapping much easier. In terms of company ownership, yeah they're both not great companies. However, I'd rather have two evil companies competing than one evil company with a monopoly.
And keep in mind: it's two evil companies BUT the images they're hosting are all CC-BY-SA licensed. So you can do a bunch of things with them and none of those companies can/will stop you.
I think this is different from the usual "big evil company bad, locking users in" mentality that we have around a lot of things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc....
Atleast here the 'content' is open and available to use.
(I still think it's good to have our own servers, fyi)