The exchange is about Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
What a horrible click-bait title. No one and nothing was “destroyed” here. He replied in a polite manner to a company whose goals do not align with his own.
Fuck Meta and all they stand for.
They have done nothing to earn open community’s cooperation. On the contrary, they have not atoned for weakening democracy in countries all over the world AND distributing powerful data about its users both for money and by inadequate security.
OK, I’m just using fancy words to say Fuck You, Meta and Zuck in particular.
'Member when the Zuck assured everyone that Facebook cared deeply about their privacy, and then immediately turned around and quietly implemented features where people had to opt-out of sharing all their shit (when opting out was even an option at all), and those users didn’t even know it?
Ah, the good ol’ days. And I don’t even resent it due to being personally affected. I’ve never had a FB account, and I just watched from the sidelines as it affected people I know and love and the broader online community as a whole.
I don’t think they “destroyed” Meta. Meta was polite and they were passive aggressive? What is there to celebrate?
“Reports of Meta’s Destruction Greatly Exaggerated”
OK, it’s one of my pet peeves that every fricking disagreement is headlined as X destroyed Y. Click-bait is the bane of the internet and makes everything worse. Don’t participate.
I’m glad Kev got to speak their mind, but I highly doubt this changed anything meaningful over at Zuck HQ.
Exactly. I don’t get what was so great about being passive aggressive to a Meta employee
Seriously, if you want to see them squirm, hit them with a wall of silence. They clearly feel they need something and, for Meta, negative feedback is better than no feedback at all.
Meta is going for a price run on failure it feels like, I worked for a company bought out by (no names to prevent breaking my NDA) them super publically and then a year or so later firing 90% of the staff and replacing them (for no reason) and leaving a skeleton crew.
And as expected things have just been on a steady decline ever since. The people running the show at Meta have to be off their rocks on coke.
They just wanted your former company to not exist anymore. That’s what they do: see competition and eat it.
That’s the thing though, it’s still around and getting marketed by them as one of their major products. So they’re beating a dead horse that they shot to death themself really.
Beating an astral dead horse rather than a corpse
I agree with you guys, it could be problematic to work with #Meta but maybe it could be the step we need to make the fediverse mainstream. The things to discuss are the conditions but the frontal confrontation baybe will not be the answer this time.
Instagram already had an app named Threads. Can they not think of a new name?
This conversation will be off the record, as the team may discuss confidential details that should not be discussed with others
Translation: Nobody needs to know how much money we offer you as a bribe.
My guess is that anyone attending will have to sign an NDA. That will make it hard to speak out against Meta joining the federation. If someone does say anything, the Meta lawyers will destroy them.
They did with the last one. That’s why there’s so much distrust about it.
Do you have a link? I’d like to know that
sorrystory too.
I need meta to just stay away from the fediverse forever
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?
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.
they could make their own custom version of the fediverse
I mean, they already did and it’s called “Facebook” (and “Instagram”)? Are people forgetting that Fediverse apps are being developed as an alternative to the existing commercial “social media”? Meta is already heavily invested in keeping users on their platforms and killing alternatives. This is 100% an attempt to do that. They just added a pair of Groucho glasses to it and think people won’t see through the flimsy disguise.
In other words they’re trying a new way to turn the fediverse into the metaverse.
That makes about the most sense It possibly can.
You don’t have to use it though?
No, of course not. You didn’t have to use Google chat either, but here we are. I never used it but ICQ is still dead. My point is that the billion dollar companies have more power than just making instances. Once their instances have features that the rest of the fediverse doesn’t, people will be motivated to use their version instead because “it’s more convenient and I can talk to my friends.”
So your complaint is that you don’t want them to do it better?
It’s not that they might do something better.
It’s that they have a history of encouraging the competition to adopt an open standard (to gain the active users), and then purposely scuttling the standard in order to sink the competition (and leave the users with no functioning alternative).
If they do it better without contributing the improvements back to the standard then that’s something to complain about. Because then all they’re doing is a different, better, proprietary standard and they never really had any intention of embracing an open source project.
…and they never really had any intention of embracing an open source project.
Well, FOSS. Open source projects can still be proprietary, as just because you can see the source code doesn’t mean you have legal permission to use it as you wish.
Anyway, there’s a simple rule about this: capitalist corporations NEVER have the intention of embracing FOSS. Like, people want to give M$ lots of credit for contributing to the Linux kernel for a while, but the truth is that their motivation for doing so wasn’t to improve on Linux, but to gain advantage for their own hypervisor (and then cloud) platform. They’d tried to take over the web server space with Windows Server and realized it was never going to happen, so they took a step lower and tried to get every instance of Linux-based web servers running on Azure. Tailoring the Linux kernel for their brand of virtual environment was NOT done for the benefit of Linux developers or users.
“and is actually good” it won’t be actually good because with Meta the users are always going to be the product. What you are thinking is exactly what they want to do. Build the best looking app first so everybody installs it, then they’re in a position to start making the calls about the future of the fediverse.
My view is if they did do that last thing, we’d be in exactly the same place as we were when we started - with “fediverse” as a tiny niche social network mainly populated by nerds, off to the side of all the others.
I think people have kind of failed to keep a sense of scale here - fedi has something like 2million active users, Facebook has a thousand times as many. We are quite literally a rounding error.
“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.
If you think meta has any good intentions I would suggest reading this article about how they killed xmpp open protocol.
There objective will be simple, monetize and if they can’t, kill off the competition.
Edit: grammar and spelling
Thank you, it was a good read
Gross, this is obviously their attempt to embrace, extend and extinguish the Fediverse.
Yep they’ll be a good actor until they’re the biggest instance and they’ll try to turn the fediverse into whatever verse they’re feeling like that week and shove it down our throats. We’ll end up right back here in 3 years of we choose as a community to federate (i.e. give free content) to Meta.
savage
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.
Exactly, they might play along in the beginning, even stretch it by putting all the non-Meta conversations in green text. But once their instance becomes the largest one, they’ll start making it difficult for everyone else.
I don’t entirely disagree. An open standard should be open. I am expecting shenanigans from Meta from the classic “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” playbook though.
To avoid a Google XMPP repeat, I think the anti-Meta disfederation alliance might be the right path. Some instances can just outright refuse to Federate with corporate instances, others could have strict conditions, and more laissez faire instances will always have a backstop if (when) Meta starts playing badly.
It’s tough to say though. Microsoft was the largest contributors to Linux for a few years, out of self interest. Optimizing Linux for running on Azure. Still, the Linux kernel guarded itself well, and Linux is fine.
Of course in the Linux kernel, you have lots of large corporations “cooperating” in some sort of standoff. If Meta, Twitter, Google, Microsoft all started using ActivityPub, you could find a similar situation emerge. The popularity of Gmail doesn’t let Google break email so badly that it doesn’t work with Outlook (or Yahoo, AOL, etc).
Your first mistake is setting a minimum expectation for a Meta product. They’ve not promised it will do any of that and they already have you thinking it will based on nothing but rumor.
I do mind. EEE is a well established strategy. This time won’t be different than every other time so massive tech company pretended to embrace open standards.
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TL;DR (if you can’t be bothered reading all of the below) - Fosstodon will wait and see what happens, but if Facebook’s new service introduces any issues that could negatively impact our users, we will defederate.
This is Fosstodon’s official stance on the whole Facebook joining the Fediverse debacle.
Which is a bad plan, TBH. At this point in history, zero waiting needs to be done to know exactly the sense of Meta’s involvement. The “if” is a certainty.
yeah i mean i… don’t know why you’d “wait and see”. it’s literally Facebook. they’re going to negatively impact your community, if not in features (lol) then in sheer size and volume.
