So, recently some fediverse admins (mostly Mastodon) and the founder of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko (Gargron), where contacted by Meta/Facebook for an NDA meeting. We know nothing about it, but we're pretty sure that it was about this project92 thing that Meta/Facebook is creating to "compete" with Twitter.
So a lot of Mastodon admins already singed a pact to immediately block any Meta/Facebook activity in the fediverse as soon as it comes up. My Mastodon instance, fosstodon.org hasn't singed that pact and I'm pretty worried.
The following image is an screenshot of Gargron and dansup (creator of Pixelfed) talking about this. These posts were deleted, even from the wayback machine.
Facebook's algo drives this. It's a choice that they've amplified this content.
Can't comment much on this one, so I won't.
still because wasn't it like that when they bought it?
Now, as in, they didn't design it that way to begin with because it wasn't the profitable thing to do. They have to compete with iMessage, and further, they gain just by being able to tell every cop shop "sorry can't do it bro."
Glad your family made it. Unfortunately, though, this is the masses not understanding how technology these days really works. They don't have to read your messages or listen to your calls because they're doing that all over the web and through their own users. The truth is more nefarious because for most people "listening to my calls" is scrutable, while adding tracking cookies across the web or computing social graphs based on your contact info being shared without your consent by a few of your friends, or doing some ML on every photo shared is not.
Agreed.
Disagree. Fediverse and it's growth as it stands now is not good for Facebook, so they're trying to head it off at the pass. I'd be willing to bet this meeting was a feeler for them and I hope Eugen and others are smart enough of to say basically nothing, and they're continuing the grand tradition of embrace, extend, extinguish.
Is Meta evil? No. They're probably not a standard deviation away from any other org in terms of how many are "evil" but their incentives today all align to a worse outcome for humanity. It's kinda worse - it's a collection of incredibly smart people compartmentalized enough from the "evil" the org does. Actually, don't know that I would say "evil" so much as "sociopathic."
Meta should get no passes, and be met with absolute scrutiny related to the fediverse.