this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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They benefit by being able to say to regulators, especially in the EU, that they aren't a monopoly that locks people into their ecosystem. They avoid expensive legal battles, fines, and possibly being forced to open their other, more lucrative silos. These are lesser benefits, but they also get cred for doing something cool, get to position themselves as a better alternative to Twitter, and might get to say that they beat Bluesky to full federation.
Their last EU fine was $1.3 billion. That's change-how-you-do-things money. The EU is getting more serious about tech regulation. It also made Apple add RCS support, which they swore they'd never do.
I don't think that's possible. You have to be federated. Suspended servers can't connect at all so there's no way to transfer followers or set a redirect. It's not something you can just choose to not respect - suspension is something done to untrustworthy servers so requiring them to honor it would completely break it immediately. If they signed the fedi pact and didn't act, that's not really on Meta.
If they use a Mastodon intermediary, there's a 30-day cool down. If they use their own, they'd have to expose the IP to do it so it would be discovered. I don't see how it would benefit them to do that. If they did, that's some sketchy, bad faith shit and they'd be universally fediblocked pretty quick.
I also don't think they can monetize non-threads users because they can't send them ads. It would be difficult to connect you to a Meta account to serve ads to because they only have your user name, profile pic, server IP, and server domain name. In most cases it'd be impossible. You're pretty well protected because Mastodon servers treat all remote servers as untrustworthy and don't give them any info.
Facebook already creates "shadow profiles" for people not on Facebook and stores data about them. This means Meta won't directly monetize the fediverse, but use the data available for their ad business anyway. (Maybe even connect other accounts through posts, but I don't know how well this works with the info and amount of a users posts.)
Nothing stopping them from doing it now, anyone posting to the fediverse has to accept that their posts can and probably will be used to train someone elses LLM. It's public afterall.
[1] https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-profiles-and-should-you-be-worried/