this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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I’m surprised by all the negativity. Is it not a good thing Meta is going to use open standard instead of a proprietary one?
I think the whole reddit debacle has shown (again) that corporations and social networks don't mix.
What's Metas main incentive? Money, obviously.
What do people want? Social networking without bills, ads or privacy issues.
Those two things are incompatible.
I don't think that's true. Obviously we all think like that which is why we're here, but most people are still on reddit/twitter because they don't care about any of that, they only care about the content/experience
I agree with what you're saying, but remember that open source software cannot happen without individual contributions and donations. If you have some money to spare, even just $1 dollar, please consider donating it to the Lemmy developers. It's obviously not a requirement, but it helps keep the project going!
It's not about standards. It's about how "Meta" is going to use the data they'll collect to manipulate and advertise to you in insidious ways. They don't want to cooperate with the Fediverse, they want to control it. Those are the issues and the source of negativity.
Early on when Google wasn't shit and Facebook was just coming out of the startup phase both of them had chat platforms based on XMPP (the OG federating protocol). For a few glorious moments everyone could chat with anyone through the corresponding XMPP endpoints. At some point they decided they can't be arsed anymore and shut off federation on their servers. They captured enough market and siloed their users.
There's 1 million % this will happen again. It's textbook EEE.
Well done on Mastodon admins for not cooperating with Facebook's strong arming tactics. Facebook's server will evolve into another walled garden, Mastodon federating with them will only help them.
Fuck them
The concern is that they will attempt to "embrace, extend, and extinguish". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
The FOSS community is wary due to "embrace, extend, extinguish" approach by various tech giants in the past. When a tech giant suddenly want to embrace federation while offering no details whatsoever, people are right to be wary.
The flipside is that a standard's not really open and a network founded on one isn't really resilient if certain groups or corporates arbitrarily aren't seen as "allowed" to use it, or if conversely a big corporate joining it is so toxic to the entire endeavour that it must be blocked on sight.
Chris Trottier, someone who I disagree with quite a lot and is a far bigger advocate for decentralisation as a public good than I am, is quite sanguine about P92 on those grounds.
Personally, I have no plans on my instances to submit P92 to any more stringent rules than I would with any other server blocks, that is I will give them exactly enough rope to hang themselves with.
Quoting Chris Trottier here:
I disagree with him as strongly as possible. That view is to the point of abhorrent. The problem at the core is that he and everybody in the "let's allow Meta in" group is that they see it as this big machine everybody should be using, while the rest of us care so much less about that than about the communities that have formed and have been slowly growing here, that are about to be strip-mined by Meta as they do EEE.
We do NOT need to wait and see, we have years of experience of Meta's modus operandi, and the communities of the Fediverse just cannot survive their invasion. And we don't want that!
Including this one.
I think they have a history of being amoral/indifferent towards the spaces they create/impact of their (lack of) moderation, and as if that wasn't enough, I also think that they are entering the fediverse at the worst possible time in terms of disdain for corporations
May the disdain never fade until monopolies are destroyed.
Sic Semper Tyrannis
It's not
Thanks for sharing, that article is fresh out of the oven!
Having been interested in Open Source software for a few years, I always give big companies the side-eye when they suddenly take great interest into FOSS projects.
I am not against talk and federation, but Meta needs to make clear their motivations if they want the Fediverse's trust at all.
They have already lost all trust.
Precisely, they are starting from a position of zero or negative trust for many. For me, they don't get the benefit of doubt unless they earn it back.
Even if they make their intentions clear, why would we believe or trust them? What's to stop them straight up lying about their intentions? When there are investors involved, all ethics go out the window.
Meta is not going to "use" this technology, they want to own it. And youncsnnbe certain they will try their best to build a walled garden with a Facebook login, so the masses pick their form of fediverse rather than the one not controlled by big tech.
Peoples negativity comes from experience with these corporations. You are probably pretty young if you don't see how bad they are.
You say this as if the masses are currently interested in fediverse in general, and give a shit about whether it's controlled by big tech or not.
Fact is most people don't know about fedi and a great deal of those who do don't care, and the only chance you'll get them anywhere near a fediverse service if someone (be that Meta, or anyone else) wraps it up in a little bow for them and delivers it to them.