The exchange is about Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
Kinda shook at the Meta-supporting comments. They should not be anywhere near the fediverse. Meta is a business first and the users are the product. Companies now just want to maximize profits, minimize costs, and hoard wealth for… rocket ships? Fediverse itself is community-owned, independent, and decentralized.
With how new all of these controversies are, it’s kinda baffling that people are still defending this company. They’re going to continue to exploit anything and everything for profits. It wouldn’t even surprise me if the genuine reason they’re interested in this concept is because they want to take what’s open-sourced, adapt it, and commercialize it. I would imagine they’re thinking, ‘why invest in a brand new backend when we can profit off of an existing one, unrestricted.’ And this “meeting” that they’re forming is basically a free forum for them to learn and ask questions about how they can exploit the Fediverse and find any way to profit off of it. “Off the record” anything is shady as fuck.
If Meta wants to make an app that is competitive with other fediverse apps and is actually good, I don’t see the problem. If they want to harm other fediverse instances then I do. How much harm could they do to the fediverse? Would they then block off all other apps when their app is the biggest essentially?
“If Meta wants…” My concern is that the only conceivable motivation Meta could have for investing money in such a project is making more money. If, in the process, Meta destroys the eco-structure of the Fediverse, so much the better—less competition, more money for them.
That’s exactly it and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise. Meta is a financial instrument to turn money into more money. The only reason Meta would engage with any third party is to make their commercial products more attractive to advertisers. Play with Meta and before you know if they’ll be writing all the rules about how you’re allowed to run your instance.
they could make their own custom version of the fediverse, slowly diverging from the core open source version, then push the actual fediverse into obscurity, the same way Google Chat killed XMPP. Imagine a new Meta-controlled “fediverse” where you can only have an instance if you use their code and their rules.
I found this article interesting and relevant: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
this was an excellent article. I’m old enough to remember being impacted by these events.
I’m not in Munich, but I remember trying to embrace OpenOffice, and telling my wife how pissed off I was that Microsoft wasn’t following it’s own open source document standard.
I remember Google killing XMPP, and there’s also the more recent examples of what Facebook has done to WhatApp, Instagram, and the other potential competitors that got buried.
Idm meta joining tbh. At least this means your friends can be on something and you won’t be obligated to use a meta app to talk to them, peer pressure, etc
Until they pull an iOS sms situation, where non-iOS applications are missing their “exclusive features” and go as far as to break conversations through incompatibility, and then your friends are badgering you to “just join the 21st century and get an iphone already,” but with Meta-branded apps. There’s no way in hell Meta will play nicely with anything outside their ecosystem.
I really hope that we’ll be able to maintain a strong resistance and fortification against Meta taking over the fediverse.
On the one hand I can totally understand this reaction by Kev, on the other hand, by completely locking off all discussions like this, means that there’s no way to change things for the better.
Granted, it’s Meta, they’re not to be trusted, but still, a discussion, if one has the time, wouldn’t be too bad an idea.
I think it would be incredibly naive and foolish to believe Meta has any kind of pure motives for this.
One of the biggest corporations in the world reaching out to its competitor to try to get them to talk “off the record” about “confidential details”… Sounds like a pretty blatant scheme to get them to reveal confidential details about their competitor’s product.
Or maybe Meta has broken with decades of its own conduct, and several centuries of capitalism, in order to reach out in good faith to their competitor. LOL.
