this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Does anyone know what there business model could be here? Technically they could get access to all federated content, just as regular instances do. But legally they don't own that content nor do they know what country it origi ated in. This sounds like a legal nightmare to me. Would they even be allowed to process content in any form created by EU users under GDPR?
It's not about any business model. It's about killing competition. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is exactly it. They'll dump a few billion new users on the network and then graciously offer some developer time to Mastodon, Lemmy et al since there's no way they'll currently be able to take the sort of loads we're talking about.
Might even offer to host your Fediverse instance for free, as you struggle to deal with the load caused by activity going up 1000x
That would be an option. However, non-Meta users would not have agreed to any terms that grant them a right to use the content. So, I could imagine that individual users could object to them using their content or even ask for compensation if they use it in any way to make money. Then again, Meta has the lawyers to fight this out. Until there is a final decision, maybe they already killed the competition as @AkumaFoxwell@feddit.de suggests...
I question how much legal ground there'd be for individuals "withdrawing consent" to be incorporated into their platform. I think the legal question would be, "what reasonable expectation of privacy did the users have by posting content to an open-sourced network?". I'd guess their argument would be "well, they shared their content on an open network that we are also a part of."
They've been dealing with user attrition and content degradation, I imagine this could be a way for them to solve that problem. They could even just develop an app that connects to the fediverse, they don't even need to start their own instance. They could then feed ads and gather data based on their users data.
I think this will be harder to stop than we're thinking.
Fully agree. We can only decide if we want to give them a chance to be good citizens of the fediverse or not.
I don't really even think we have that choice. We can de-federate if they spin up an instance, but I don't even know they need to do that much. We'll see I guess