No Stupid Questions

I think meta is deliberately trying to fly under the radar until it too late. Several fedi communities have signed a 'pledge' saying they will actively block meta fedi content from their servers. (Similar to what most are already doing with Truth Social which is just another mastodon instance).

I have no desire to interact with Facebook via Lemmy. Fuck that idea. And I think it's shady that there's Mastodon admins having secret meetings with Fuckerberg and his cronies and keeping the details secret. I think it's even worse to see Mastodon servers defederating with other servers just because their admins are critical of Meta. I feel bad for all the users who fled to Mastodon just to get away from Big Corporate Social Media just to be shushed and have their concerns handwaved by their Admin who seems bizarrely starstruck. It all leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

Btw for those curious, Meta/FB approaching Mastodon admins is related to their in-development Project92/Threads possible Twitter-successor/competitor.

As it says at the start of the article, the intent is integrate ActivityPub in it in some way. Concerns are being raised for a variety of understandable possibilities some have mentioned here, or sort of alluded to, such as the corporate practice of Embracing, Extending, and Extinguishing. An idea being that Facebook may only be adopting ActivityPub to in some way screw everyone else using it over.

There's also the possibilities of questionable FB moderation practices permitting a flooding of linked instances with unmoderated FB garbage, scraping data (but since most of the fediverse stuff is public they...Don't really need their own public app to do that), and so on.

If it ends up bad for the overall environment of the fediverse, they'll just get defederated. A lot of the folks on Mastadon are getting worked up because the identity of this corner of the internet is decidedly anti-corporate. The thing is, it's just a few clicks for any instance-owner to completely isolate that project.

It could be a big deal (initially), or it could be a giant nothingburger. Or it could be a big deal that eventually turns into a nothingburger. Too soon to say, and way too soon to throw a fit over.

I heard Facebook was going to make something "built on Mastodon," but I didn't think federation was on the table too. I would think a company wouldn't want open federation, that sounds like a content moderation nightmare.

Likewise, if I ran a Mastodon server, I'd block them immediately. I don't use Facebook for a reason, and anyone who would just blindly let Facebook scoop up their community data is part of the problem.

I've heard something about it, but I guess Lemmies have been too busy with Reddit and just building up Lemmy communities, so this flew under the radar.

And honestly yea, why should we care? If they wanna make an instance, nobody is stopping them, but I hope nobody will want to federate with them. We've had enough of corporate socials lately.

It's amazing seeing people who, after everything destructive action taken by these large corporations in these settings, still think maybe this time will magically be different and look to a corporation like it's their potential dad who they can't possibly survive let alone thrive without.

Honestly, a lot of people might disagree but, corporate involvement is essential to FOSS projects surviving. The biggest FOSS project on the planet, Linux, is literally propped up by the biggest corporations on the planet.

The only potential issue I see here is maybe Meta forks ActivityPub and it becomes a "Meta Project" or some other fuckery. Outside of that I don't see any major issues with it. If we want ActivityPub to become something greater, we're going to need corporations on board. We have strong protections in place right now with a lot of the stuff that's being used being under strong copyleft licenses, and decentralization by nature is going to allow us to opt out of a lot of the ads and tracking that takes place by being forced to use an official app.

Given the "anyone can join in" nature of the fediverse, something like this was inevitable. I expected it to be at least be another couple of years, though.

There is potential good for this- a lot more developer resources going into this technology. And being open source software, there's a lot of ways we can potentially mitigate any damage if we have to. But... there's definitely a lot of ways this can go poorly as well.

probably an unpopular opinion but facebook does also have a sort of track record of contributing to open source projects in ways that benefit everyone. facebook wanted to use subversion (or some other non-git source control) and contributed significantly so that it would work great for huge repositories like theirs. and facebook use memcached for their caches and contribute heavily so that they can use it more efficiently.

i’m also skeptical about end motivations, but in terms of being able to lend engineering effort to open source projects and helping to create a better product for all, it’s not such a bad idea.

My [paranoid] take: its vaporware designed to distract from the reddit fiasco, with plans fo mr meta to later absorb reddit instead of a reddit IPO. Reddit users are very different than Twitter users; the mass exodus didn’t happfrom Twitter to Mastodon, but looks very promising from reddit to lemmy/kbin. And it takes only one social media giant to crumble for the rest to follow. Once people are on Fediverse there is no going back

it's an interesting development that will have a direct impact on lemmy since mastodon and lemmy users can interact with each other.

time will tell how closely they follow microsoft's old "embrace, extend, extinguish" game plan for combatting open standards. who knows? maybe they will be good faith actors in this new space, or won't be able to gain enough user share to truly do nasty stuff.

I have no desire to interact with Facebook via Lemmy. Fuck that idea. And I think it's shady that there's Mastodon admins having secret meetings with Fuckerberg and his cronies and keeping the details secret. I think it's even worse to see Mastodon servers defederating with other servers just because their admins are critical of Meta. I feel bad for all the users who fled to Mastodon just to get away from Big Corporate Social Media just to be shushed and haave their concerns handwaved by their Admin who seems a little starstruck. It all leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

On the one hand, embrace-extend-extinguish is a classic playbook for big evil companies.

1. Facebook runs a version of mastodon or lemmy or whatever that is actually good
2. People get on board because it's usable and ostensibly open
3. Facebook invents features that, sadly, are not possible with ActivityPub (actual private messages come to mind)

On the other hand, it remains to be seen if anyone takes Meta up on a new offering. I'd have complete faith in the future of the open Internet if it was Google trying this.

I haven’t really heard that much about this. But I am very skeptical of any claims that Facebook is actually going to fedderate in good faith.

Obviously, it’ll be up to the administrators of the different instances whether to federate or not. So we’ll see

I also wonder how big the overlap is between people who would use a federated platform and those who would willingly use anything made by Facebook.

With that said, I’ll never say never, but I find the likelihood of this taking off to be slim to none