The exchange is about Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
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.
A 45 minute “round table” with multiple rando masto instance admins? That doesn’t sound like enough time for the table to get very round.
It sounds more like 5 minutes introduction, 30 minute presentation by Meta, 10 minutes Q&A. But oops our presentation ran just a bit long, and I really do have a hard stop at noon so we really only have about 5 minutes for questions thanks for all of the valuable feedback we’ll be sure to circle back offline.
Ah, I see you’ve taken part in Bullshit Corporate Meetings™ before!
a true person of culture!
“We here at Meta take people’s privacy very seriously and are committed to protecting our users. Unfortunately at this time we can’t discuss what measures we’ve put in place.”
Unfortunately at this time we can’t discuss what measures we’ve put in place…
Because we have none, as it’s counteractive to our revenue models.
I don’t think they “destroyed” Meta. Meta was polite and they were passive aggressive? What is there to celebrate?
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.
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.
deleted by creator
I sincerely hope that as many admins as possible instantly defederate from metas instance if they ever launch one.
Yes. Keep those manipulative crooks away from the fediverse!
Exactly, off the record means the expectation is Meta will be given free expertise to gain an edge on their competitors. Don’t give diddly squat to actors who want to commercialize your content. It will never end well for you, only Meta.
Also: why would you want to discuss confidential information in the presence of Meta of all companies? Their reputation precedes them.
The only confidential information about the fediverse that I can see is account information. And maybe metrics. But most metrics can be gathered by polling APIs of servers anyway. It’s an open system, unless they defederate with you.
IMO the “confidential” part is that they want to offer this person some kind of deal to shut their shit down or assimilate. Basically, they’re going to offer to “buy them out” (though that phrase doesn’t seem completely appropriate to the non-corporate world, so it’s a little weird to use it).
I wonder if Gab was invited. It would be hilarious if the only instances willing to federate with Meta were Nazis.
I think Gab completely broke off from the fediverse at this point. not just from being blocked, but also not bothering to keep themselves up to date on their end as well. That being said. I wonder if Meta would be even aware of that, or if they would care if they considered inviting Gab.
But I imagine it’s now likely that at least one person suggested inviting them and someone with some common sense shut that down pretty fast.
It’s hilarious for Meta to invite some person who happens to run a server to an “off the record” conversation with “confidential details that should not be shared with others” anyway. LOL.
The only “confidential” information that’s likely to be involved in such an exchange would be some kind of bribe for the person to shut down or assimilate their infrastructure with Meta’s. It’s not like they’re going to reveal Meta’s trade secrets to someone they believe to essentially be a competitor or anything.
This has me thinking, is there a space set aside for putting profits over people instances out and center so admins can preemptively defederate and/or block them?
I haven’t found one yet but I am rather new to this.
I think it’ll be harder than that, even.
Meta doesn’t need to spin up an instance to abuse user data on the fediverse, they just need an app that can read it. A hypothetical meta fediverse app could allow users to select their own instance and still read and collect data on the connected instances. As far as I know, there is no way in the protocol to prevent this.
Our exchange here is public, a gift to humanity and all aliens that might stumble upon it. If meta can make money from it, so be it. But anyone else can just as well.
Except they can build proprietary code on top of it and take over open-sourced activitypub adoption
It’s just another way to kill competition
The people who would use a Meta variant will use it, and people like us will not. This reminds me of the interview with the Mexican restaurant that spawned Taco Bell. The lady who owned it essentially said, “I’m glad he (the founder of Taco Bell) was able to take our teachings and turn it into something. Good for him.” If they build proprietary code, that’s nice. ActivityPub will still be the same open-source code it’s always been, and all of the Fediverse stuff will still exist. It kinda sucks that Meta is trying to make it seem like they’re the good guys, but in the end there isn’t much they can do to the already established stuff beyond make their own.
Edit: also, if they do try anything, we at least have previous data and most of the people who care about freedom to privacy here that I’m sure we could come up with something. We’re not getting blindsided like with Google and XMPP back in the day.
The “extend” part is fundamental before they can actually get to the “extinguish” stage: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Once Meta joins in, a new set of dynamics are going to develop between old fediverse uses and new meta/fediverse users. If Meta adopts an “EEE” approach such as the ones described in the article, there’s going to be disruption in the user experience from which the fediverse might never fully recover
Edit: clarification on the last sentence, my main concern is that a growing niche protocol such as ActivityPub might be destined to irrelevancy after Meta is done with the Extend & Extinguish, similarly to what happened to XMPP
they may be able to read certain data from another instance but their current platform allows complete surveillance of what you looked at, how long, every click and scroll, etc while also being able to feed that in to manipulating what you see.
imo it will be basically impossible to have that kind of impact on people from instances not controlled by them, particularly if the other instance defederates so they don’t see meta instance content.
See yashima’s comment below: them adopting ActivityPub is just another way of killing it. The link they provided I think should be mandatory reading
It‘s not just about the data—which is bad enough but as you said they could just write a crawler to get at it. The question is why would they want to federate and why now? Meta being Meta the most likely reasons are terrible for the fediverse and it reminds me very much of Google and xmpp. I saw a really good writeup on this yesterday: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Thank you for sharing this, it was a fascinating and frustrating read
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?
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
“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.
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.
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.
A more important topic is, what federated data will be kept on Meta, and most importantly HOW that data will be processed/used/sold by Meta.
meta can already freely pull that data from any instance
ActivityPub baby!
“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.
A good response. Civlised and to-the-point.
I disagree.
I hope there’ll be people discussing sensibly.
For example the question how the rest of the fediverse would like Meta to act, when / if they have the by far largest instance on Fediverse with Threads.
Should they Rate-Limit queries from their users to other Instances, as to not overload them? This would protect other instances, but make the federated experience worse, driving more people to threads.
Would the Fediverse rather that Meta mirrors images etc on their servers too, or pull those from the original server?
Maybe they have UX ideas that would be useful to have somewhat uniform (like the subreddit/community/magazine stuff here), and would like input on them.Of course just blocking them is an option for the fediverse, but doing that blindly seems like a missed opportunity for both sides.
More freely available content would be great, wouldn’t it?Maybe they have Ideas on the protocol, that they want to talk with admins about as a first step to gain more perspective. And certainly they are likely to be data-hungry greedy shit, but there is a chance that they are actually good ideas - there are actual people working at meta after all.
There’s tons of ways in which this could be useful, and I don’t really understand the completely blocking approach I see a lot of.
They want to use ActivityPub, that’s awesome, finally something new and big that uses an open freaking standard on the web. What are the downsides? If it sucks for communities they can easily block Meta.
Yes, Meta is not a Company working for the betterment of the world, certainly.
But maybe, just maybe, goals align here, and Meta can make money and improve the Fediverse and the Internet with it. And certainly, maybe they want to “take over” ActivityPub, and that would indeed be bad. And even then, wouldn’t knowing because they told you be much better than knowing because they’re meta?
So, if they want to change the Protocol, be very, very wary of their proposals. But even there there they could just want reasonable improvements because they suddenly deal with 100x of the next biggest instances.tl;dr: when you tell people what you’d like them to do, it increases the chances of them doing that.
An interesting and nuanced response - thank you. I’m not quite sure I agree, as it rather assumed good faith - but food for thought.
There seems very little incentive for Meta to federate with anyone, except good faith, right?
They’ll double the Fediverse Userbase in an hour, or less.It’d be entirely open to Meta to simply turn off federation, in the same way that Truth Social and Counter Social have.
But honestly if I were them, given the hostile reaction I’d probably just do that and knock the whole ActivityPub thing on the head. It feels like a waste of time when realistically they would get more people on Threads/P92 in one day than a million Musk-buying-Twitters could do with Mastodon. Then everyone is happy - no Meta on fedi, Meta gets its new exciting Twitter clone that it fully controls.
Put it this way - either they’re up to some form of non-specific evil, in which case they can probably achieve whatever goals they have far more concretely if they fully control the content on Threads, or they’re not and all this is actually in good faith, in which case they’re doing this for the benefit of a few hundred thousand fedi nerds who have reacted mostly with hostility and are going to block it on sight.
The ‘embrace, extend, extinguish’ strategy is a well known one. Set out with a strategy to become the biggest instance, capture lots and lots of new users. Introduce some swanky new features that ‘unfortunately initially don’t federate very well, but we are working in that’. Then defederate from other instances that don’t adopt your features - etc etc
But they won’t be capturing new users from the Fediverse, they will capture them from Facebook and Instagram, and since this is mainly a Twitter competitor, also from Twitter.
I think you’re missing the point. We are weary of Facebook’s decision to enter the Fediverse exactly because we know it sees the Fediverse as a long-term threat and it could try to extinguish it. While they at first would adopt open standards and protocols, what stops them from creating proprietary extensions and using those and its dominance and resources to make it difficult for users to switch to other platforms in the Fediverse?
While they at first would adopt open standards and protocols, what stops them from creating proprietary extensions and using those and its dominance and resources to make it difficult for users to switch to other platforms in the Fediverse?
Nothing, which should probably raise concerns around how good a standard ActivityPub actually is if all it takes to drive a truck through its intent is one bad actor.
I’d guess the plan is that if the fediverse and meta mingles together, the fedi-users start to follow the meta users in such amount that when the breakup finally happens, they are reliant on meta to continue. People stay on facebook, eating the ads and manipulation just because their mothers and friends are there.
Just thought about the future nightmare of receiving an invite on mastodon to a friends private meta-instance “party” and to view it you are suddenly offered to either decline or import your fedi-account.
Facebook has done federation before - for example, back when they weren’t winning at chat, they integrated their chat system with other Jabber / XMPP servers so that people felt chat wasn’t a walled garden and could talk with people using other clients.
How did it end? 7 years later, once enough people were on Facebook Chat, they closed the gates to the walled garden by completely ending XMPP support: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/15/07/16/131254/facebook-finally-ends-xmpp-support-for-3rd-party-chat.
So it is really just about leveraging the fediverse to get users onto their product (and their current products, while they are similar in that they are about social networking, aren’t really like exactly like Lemmy or Mastodon). If they are successful enough, what is to stop them locking the gate to the walled garden again?
No incentive other than good faith? This is one of the most profitable corporations that has ever existed, talking to one of its competitors. If you think this is how corporations operate, I’ve got news for you. This is like Capitalism 101.
Yeah, because the ~2 Million monthly active users on the whole fediverse actually matters to the company with 2.95 billion active users on Facebook and 1.2 billion monthly active users on Instagram.
those 2 Million Fediverse users are .06% or .167% compared.yeah, those rounding errors are totally the reason why Meta is going for ActivityPub
Fascinating comment from someone who doesn’t understand rates of growth at all, and has no idea why this “offer” is coming at this point in time.
Nobody’s saying that, in terms of user bases, the Fediverse is comparable to Facebook or Instagram. And it seems to me that you are misrepresenting why people here, myself included, don’t want our instances to federated with Facebook. It’s not that we don’t want bigger communities. Most of us have been on Facebook or Reddit and have given up on those bigger communities and adopted the Fediverse because it aligns with our values and privacy principles. Facebook does not. Its Fediverse platform will not suddenly be the opposite of what the company has been doing for more than a decade.
Nobody’s saying that, in terms of user bases, the Fediverse is comparable to Facebook or Instagram
Well, maybe I got the wrong impression, but I felt like the userbase of the fediverse was implied as the motivation for Meta federating.
And I wanted to put in a comparison, why I don’t think that this is the case.I don’t see a reason why Meta should want Threads to federate, except for “well, whatever, doesn’t hurt us to get those fractions of a percent”. They’ll probably have to use whitelists anyway, due to different legal situations on different instances. So at best they’ll federate with some of the bigger instances.
Most of us have been on Facebook or Reddit and have given up on those bigger communities and adopted the Fediverse because it aligns with our values and privacy principles.
I’m sorry to tell you, but your privacy isn’t exactly great here.
Every Thread, Comment and Upvote at least can be requested from any fediverse instance.
And do you know what, you don’t even have to be a fediverse instance yourself to do that.
But I guess you knew that, so you’re here because nobody tracks what you look at, which is great, and because you like Open Source.
That’s not going to Change when Meta Federates.Facebook does not. Its Fediverse platform will not suddenly be the opposite of what the company has been doing for more than a decade.
That’s true.
But it will be two things, if I may steal the analogy of someone else in this thread:
first it will be a black hole ripping through the Fediverse.
I’d like that to do as little damage as possible.
I’d love it if mastodon continues to grow after Metas release, and doesn’t collapse under server costs, Spam and other detrimental effects.
For that, preparing for the coming storm seems useful.second it will be a huge amount of possible connections, of people.
I’d love to be able to toot a reply to some meta thread.
I mean, wouldn’t it be nice if the fediverse would already know certain rules that meta may require to federate with them? And I mean sensible rules, like no/flagged porn, issues with piracy etc.
One could also talk about how Meta allows/blocks instances. A lot of legal trouble for Meta could probably be avoided if they only show posts from a whitelist of instances, but any user could post to their instance.
But how would they deal with non-whitelisted instances trying to pull Threads-Content?
Maybe they want to talk about how to deal with those “half-federating” situations, because this is not the current norm, and they may not actually get more bad press when a meeting could have prevented it.For both of these effects I think communication with meta can only help.
The history of Facebook (there I said it) and the EEE example MS already provided us years ago (as referenced by @HeartyBeast ) does not incline me to believe in their good faith. If Meta has proven one thing over and over and over, it’s that their interests will always lie in harvesting of user data to enrich themselves, and that any restraint on their part will be that which is legislatively forced.
Let the Fediverse grow on its own. It’s not a race. And it’s surely not a race best won by letting the wolf in through the front door.
The day we federate with Meta is the day I find the fediverse instances that refuse to do so, and take my account there.
Edit: Blog post on this topic that goes into some detail about historical precedent and etc.
Even if they are acting in good faith, I think they’ve earned our derision and deserve to be shut out. You don’t get to play unfairly for decades then turn around and expect no consequences.
Respectful post, but respectfully disagree. The longer the fediverse can stay free of monetary-driven communities, the longer it will last. Wait until the proposals for blue check marks and karma hit the ActivityPup “plus” standard and it’s too late for the platform.
tl;dr: when you tell people what you’d like them to do, it increases the chances of them doing that.
In my experience when you tell huge corporations what you’d like them to do, it has no bearing on whether or not they will do that.
Facebook/Meta wouln’t even moderate out incitements to genocide when multiple people asked that of them for years, so it seems naive to assume they care at all about the people in the fediverse.
They are profit driven with a laser focus, and this is a really obvious attempt at co opting, not collaborating.
Facebook/Meta wouln’t even moderate out incitements to genocide
This might cause instances to have a legal obligation not to federate with them, as some countries forbid you from supporting places where hate speech exists.
If that’s the case then there’s no need for it to be off-record. Unless the conversation of what you pointed out is open to scrutiny it shouldn’t happen.
This is the real point here. If this is a legit talk about legit points then it can be open for everyone to see.
Starting talks with Meta behind closed doors can never happen. If they have something to say or ask then they can do it publicly.
I am all for talk, because that’s the part that hurts no one, but make it as transparent as humanly possible from all angles.
I also want to know what “the enemy” is up to, so invite them to talk as much as possible, we do not need to agree to anything just because we were talking/listening.
@TheYang @steb They want to use an open protocol? That’s great.
But then they should be open about their intentions, and not send invitations to a few select individuals to a confidential “off the record” “roundtable”. This seems just too fishy to me.I agree with you, and I appreciate that Facebook at least tries to reach out, but after all that happened I also understand that there is a certain aversion against Facebook.
More freely available content would be great, wouldn’t it?
I doubt most people moved to the fediverse simple because of better content. Personally I didn’t. And quantity doesn’t mean quality.
And certainly they are likely to be data-hungry greedy shit, but there is a chance that they are actually good ideas - there are actual people working at meta after all.
Contributions are open for these people. But the moment the contributions are facilitated through Meta, they represent Metas business interests.
What are the downsides?
Control. Meta could swamp the fediverse and just because its open source the current platforms wouldnt necessarily continue to exist in the same way they currently do. We could see even bigger fragmentation or breaks, some Admins might feel forced to federate with Metas service, leading to the currently existing community breaking up.
But maybe, just maybe, goals align here, and Meta can make money and improve the Fediverse and the Internet with it.
Imo the last years has proven, without a doubt, that those things simply do not align.
To conclude: We have seen these things before and they havent ended well. People here seem to undererstimate the power Meta has and the impact that this power has. Even if all current instances were to defederate from Meta, simple association, user demand caused by an influx of Meta users and hard to guess power dynamics would make the fediverse a far different place than it currently is. To make a comparison: you cant drop the gravity well of a black hole into a small, complex planetary system and expect it to be unaffected.
I can imagine all sorts of technical points like how the firehose will be load-balanced so as to not overwhelm any instance, or what metadata they should include in their feeds. Meta also has a lot of AI and moderation expertise that could be of benefit to the Fediverse once it grows into an attractive enough target for the troll farms and spambots.
Quite frankly, the sooner that festering cesspool that is Twitter is killed off, the better off the planet will be. If it takes Meta to wean the talking heads like Oprah from Twitter, so be it. It would be better if Oprah set up her own instance, but that’s unlikely to happen, media businesses still haven’t understood they need to take control over their distribution rather than the easy way of going through big social networks that will stab them in the back when expedient like Facebook deprioritizing media outlets from users’ feeds.
This is super naive. Facebook/Meta has zero interest in “playing nice” with competitors in any field. Their intentions with the fediverse are not pure, and you’re a fool if you think otherwise.
This is capitalism, and this is one of the most profitable corporations that has ever existed on the planet. A corporation who has made those profits almost entirely from the private data of its users (and even some users that aren’t subscribed to their service. That’s how much data they have).
They don’t “work together” with competitors “for the good of everyone.” That’s a pipe dream.
Yeah large EEE on ActivityPub feels like almost a given if they start to use it.
But should you block people from embracing a good thing, just because you’re scared they’ll try to extend and extinguish?
I really wish kbin had user tagging just so I could tag you as a “leopards eating faces” party member.
no one is preventing people who have facebook or instagram accounts from joining the fediverse by blocking meta. what they are doing, is preemptively taking action to ensure an immoral company doesn’t do exactly what it has shown itself to be in it’s nature to do.
Thanks for answering “the Yang” so that I don’t need to :-)
Remember, don’t feed the trolls !
I get your argument, but fundamentally
more freely available content would be great, right?
doesn’t hold true. For example I don’t need a flood of Instragram thots on my Mastodon or Lemmy pages, even if I got it for free. Quality is more important than quantity, I am here for in-depth discussions on current events and issues we face, with individuals capable of empathy and critical thinking. Considering the types of interactions that come from Facebook and related sites, I need better public reassurance that Meta’s involvement won’t tank the platform and it’s vibe.
We’ve handled the Reddit migration about as well as we could have hoped, but the folks on Meta are a whole different beast. Many will be fine but there will also be a chunk of people completely blind to forum Nettiquite.
Lastly Meta acting behind closed doors is antithetical to FOSS development ethos. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I would refuse closed door discussions but be open to public ones. NDAs are rich corporations’ tools to silence people.
Of course just blocking them is an option for the fediverse, but doing that blindly seems like a missed opportunity for both sides.
More freely available content would be great, wouldn’t it?The issue is once you open these floodgates you’re not going to be able to close them, at least not without alienating a vast majority of users on both sides. Furthermore, once meta gains the majority of users and content on its instances (and this is really more of a “when”, not “if” situation), they can start making changes to AP and overall infrastructure and forcing other instances to either adapt to that, or get left behind one by one, similar to what google does regardless of W3C and other browsers have to adapt even though it goes against the agreed standard.
If meta gains a foothold in the fediverse and eventually start isolating the smaller instances, it’s going to be the email situation all over again, we’ll have just a few large trusted providers and the rest will be a seemingly unsafe niche that most people avoid. Giving them the benefit of the doubt is just foolish, meta will not let a few fediverse admins dictate their policy (even assuming they have the backbone to stand up to them, and considering the recent meeting/NDA/“shareholder” drama most of them definitely don’t).
Better to nip it in the bud than let it fester like a wound. Give companies as evil as meta an inch and they’ll take a mile.
The issue is once you open these floodgates you’re not going to be able to close them, at least not without alienating a vast majority of users on both sides.
I mean, users of Meta producs are already plenty alienated from Lemmy etc, aren’t they?
once meta gains the majority of users and content on its instances (and this is really more of a “when”, not “if” situation)
I mean, it’s a matter of… minutes? hours?, probably not days even.
That’s why I’d like to be able to talk to them.they can start making changes to AP and overall infrastructure and forcing other instances to either adapt to that, or get left behind one by one, similar to what google does regardless of W3C and other browsers have to adapt even though it goes against the agreed standard.
And I agree that these are very very dangerous. I wouldn’t say they could only be bad, but still.
Anyway, not following bad changes by meta would leave people where?
Exactly where they are right now.
In that case, Meta joining the fediverse would have been a failed experiment.it’s going to be the email situation all over again, we’ll have just a few large trusted providers and the rest will be a seemingly unsafe niche that most people avoid.
I have to say… That seems like a win though.Billions of people using interoparable software to talk to each other. Email is a brilliant success!
Yes, having “few” larger instances isn’t great, but on the other hand most companies run their own email server, and those talk fine with anyone else.
Doesn’t seem like a terrible result to me.
Much rather “the Email situation” than the “whatsapp situation” or “signal situation” or “facebook situation” or “reddit situation” or “instagram situation” or “tiktok situation” where you have to join that specific thing to talk to people.Anyway, not following bad changes by meta would leave people where?
Exactly where they are right now.
In that case, Meta joining the fediverse would have been a failed experiment.Not really, in the greater context of meta controlling the vast majority of fediverse we would be the ones that are a failed experiment, a niche group of old people yelling at clouds, not willing to get with the times and join the instance that has all the content, all the users and all the new tech improvements. Just look at how much shit beehaw got for temporarily defederating the 2 largest lemmy instances, now imagine when that happens to your instance and it gets cut off from meta permanently. It’d be like trying to maintain a twitter competitor while twitter was still in its golden age.
Billions of people using interoparable software to talk to each other. Email is a brilliant success!
People don’t create private instances or join smaller communities for their email provider, they go to gmail, hotmai or even protonmail for the promise of stability, safety and compatibility with others, not getting listed as spam bots or their mail going straight into trash. Companies have dedicated people to handle this but in my experience even they just end up using microsoft or google software in the background, just with their custom domain. It is a big success for email and these corporations, it is a terrible story for the open and community-controlled internet and fediverse.
a niche group of old people yelling at clouds, not willing to get with the times and join the instance that has all the content, all the users and all the new tech improvements.
I feel like this already describes us pretty darn well.
So I don’t see the disadvantage to potentially going back here.People don’t create private instances or join smaller communities for their email provider, they go to gmail, hotmai or even protonmail for the promise of stability, safety and compatibility with others, not getting listed as spam bots or their mail going straight into trash.
you mean like the 89.5% of active users of kbin being on kbin.social or 50% of active lemmy users being on lemmy.ml, lemmy.world or beehaw.org?
That’s just normal, and as long as it’s still possible to create smaller communities it’s fine.I feel like this already describes us pretty darn well.
So I don’t see the disadvantage to potentially going back here.Not quite sure what your point is, just general apathy? Currently the servers you listed are practically 100% of fediverse, we’re literally the early adopters right now and not the isolated obsolete old people. If meta comes you’re not going to get to “go back here”, that’s the whole point of discussion - what them coming means for the current fediverse and what kind of damage it can cause.
you mean like the 89.5% of active users of kbin being on kbin.social or 50% of active lemmy users being on lemmy.ml, lemmy.world or beehaw.org?
Fediverse has gotten a massive sudden influx of players and it’s natural that everyone rushed the few available instances. If anything, the fact that it’s split between kbin.social, lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, beehaw rather than everyone being on just one is already a good sign.
as long as it’s still possible to create smaller communities it’s fine.
¯\(ツ)/¯
You can still do the same on reddit yet you felt the need to come here, so obviously you care at least a bit about outside interference.Not quite sure what your point is, just general apathy?
That we have different perspectives. I already see us as the old guys shouting at the clouds (of reddit etc) for being bad. I certainly shout enough at most of Metas and Googles and Apples and Tencents products to fit that bill. I certainly don’t have all of the technology that some other people use, because I’m not willing to sell my soul to those companies any more.
I don’t feel like an early adopter. Lemmy is 4 years old, ActivityPub is 5 years old, Mastodon is 7 Years old.
I feel much more like a niche idiot who doesn’t want to give FAANG the rights to his data, and because of that doesn’t live with the times and doesn’t have google maps, isn’t on instagram for my friends to reach and doesn’t know about the latest tiktok trend.If meta comes you’re not going to get to “go back here”, that’s the whole point of discussion - what them coming means for the current fediverse and what kind of damage it can cause.
No, it’s about what happens here when meta comes. We will not stop it.
And yes, Meta can do quite a lot of damage, although I’d guess a “non-meta-fediverse” i.e. a fediverse that completely blocks all meta-content would reasonably quickly look just like this, because it’s what we have right now.
Anyway, because of the damage they can do, one should talk to them. Even if you can’t sway them one iota, you learn of their plans, and can act accordingly.You can still do the same on reddit yet you felt the need to come here, so obviously you care at least a bit about outside interference.
No I can’t create a small reddit and federate with my friends small reddit, let alone the mother-reddit.
I can’t even create a small (modern) reddit, as the code is not open anymore.
That’s nice and all, but before we get to any of this there’s a fundamental incentive schism to overcome first. People flock to the fediverse because they are tired of being treated like cattle. If you are not the paying customer, you are the product. And you will never–NEVER–be catered to. That’s the bottom line here.
I agree. The Beautiful thing here would be that people sick of Meta could still go to fosstodon, and they could still talk to their niece on Metas Threads.
I can’t help but see that as a win for the people not on metas software.
How is it a win for me if I specifically signed up for a fediverse account to get away from data-hoarding, money-driven corporations like Facebook? I don’t want Facebook to have access to my account information, posts and comments. I think you’re missing the point about who this company is and the extent to which it is willing to go to get people’s data.
I don’t want Facebook to have access to my account information, posts and comments.
I hate to break it to you, but the very nature of the fediverse (as a distributed network where posts and account information automatically get distributed to hundreds if not thousands of independent servers you may or may not be aware of, that do not necessarily have to honour your deletion requests) means that it would be absolutely trivial for either Facebook or any other random bad actor you could think of to have access to all of that, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
This is an example I’ve given a few times, but if Meta were really just wanting to suck down data for the evulz (why they would do this I have absolutely no idea because it’s not like they could use that data for anything), they don’t need to start an instance amid a blaze of publicity. They could just go on Mastodon.social, sign up for a no-name account, grab an API key and suck down the contents of the fediverse in real time and that’s the end of it. The fediverse is not private and its very nature means that control over one’s own data is not quite as secure as ActivityPub advocates would like to pretend.
But that wasn’t my point. It’s not that I think that Facebook or Google cannot scrape Fediverse platforms/instances, it’s that even if they do, they cannot serve targeted ads based on our activity here.
We have different definitions for privacy. Since I’m active here, it should be clear that to me private doesn’t mean hidden. I like how the EFF put it, in their article on the Fediverse:
[T]he default with incumbent platforms is usually an all-or-nothing bargain where you accept a platform’s terms or delete your account. The privacy dashboards buried deep in the platform’s settings are a way to tinker in the margins, but even if you untick every box, the big commercial services still harvest vast amounts of your data. To rely on these major platforms is to lose critical autonomy over your privacy, your security, and your free expression.
But that wasn’t my point. It’s not that I think that Facebook or Google cannot scrape Fediverse platforms/instances, it’s that even if they do, they cannot serve targeted ads based on our activity here.
This is another one of those things where Meta’s claimed motivations for this don’t seem to stack up.
How exactly are Meta supposed to serve “targeted ads” to me, @bloonface, if I am on finecity.social and not [whatever Meta’s instance is]?
If I don’t have an account on their service, and never visit their website, they have no opportunity to put a tracking cookie on my computer, no opportunity to serve an ad to me (other than directly messaging me, behaviour which would absolutely get them defedded instantly by anyone who is even close to being on the fence about their presence), no link between my finecity.social account and any Meta accounts I may have… what benefit do they obtain from this?
Bluntly - how is this dastardly plan of theirs actually physically supposed to work?
A lot of people seem to have ascribed omnipotent powers to Meta far beyond what they are actually technically capable of. They can’t deliver you a tracking cookie or make your instance display a banner ad to you through ActivityPub, ffs.
Your posts and comments are public. Everyone, including Meta, already has access to them.
That’s not the problem. The problem is that Meta will control and ultimately destroy the Fediverse.
Fucking thank you. Are people really this gullible? Maybe I have a different perspective because I’ve been free from Facebook for like 15 years now, but do these people really think that Meta/Facebook wants to be nice to its competitors? Suddenly they’re going to give up the business model that has made them one of the biggest, most profitable corporations that has ever existed on this planet, and do the exact opposite of what they did to get there? LOL.
I’m honestly questioning if TheYang is reading our comments or if they are just spewing the same talking points regardless of the arguments presented to them. It’s baffling to see people so willing to embrace a corporation that has done nothing but exploit its users and their privacy.
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The problem here isn’t talking to Meta or Meta making a federated platform.
Nobody can prevent Meta from doing that anyway.
The problem is the need to push against the insistence of Meta to keep these meetings off the record. It’s against the entire philosophy of something like not only fediverse but FOSS in general.
If Meta wants good faith, they have to show it first.
Notice that in the email, Kev gives his guidance as to the matter. Do whatever the fuck you want as long as you put people first and make a product for the purpose of serving them.
This should be the attitude everyone should have first.
We will accept you as long as you’re bringing value to us, not the other way round, got that Meta?
As long as any dev is taking this approach, Meta included, I’m supporting them. If someone is secretive about their intentions about a public service which is not a for profit endeavor inherently, I’ll have a hard pass too.
A more important topic is, what federated data will be kept on Meta, and most importantly HOW that data will be processed/used/sold by Meta.
Everything you post online is public by default, stored, copied or archived by third parties without your knowledge. They don’t need a huge instance to grab data from the fediverse if they want to do that.
God thank you, I swear some people fail to realise just how ActivityPub federation works!
Post something on fedi and you lose effective control over it; for all intents and purposes, it’s out there on hundreds of different servers who don’t have to respect your deletion requests, and it’s never coming back.
And to be perfectly honest, I’m more comfortable with Meta archiving all my shitposts than, I dunno, all the nazis.
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But maybe, just maybe, goals align here
If you think that, then you haven’t read up on Facebook and XMPP.
Meta’s motives are simple: destroy the Fediverse.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
Meta does some interesting open source work, extra hands on fediverse open source might be reasonable.
Anything good Facebook/Meta has ever or will ever possibly make, immediately becomes garbage due to where it came from.
Fruit of the poisonous tree.
It sucks that a company as evil as Facebook also built and open sourced React.
React is incredibly popular because so many companies use it. They are banking on Facebook’s continued support and development, and an assumption that if Facebook is doing it then it must be right. Being rich does not automatically make one right. Having worked at a company that forced React on its developers against their wishes I can unequivocally say it’s bad.
In any system the right action should be the default action. Query parameters should be parameterized by default, variables in HTML templates should be contextually escaped by default, and so forth. “Don’t make me think”. React is the complete opposite of that: It requires you to constantly think about the render loop (aka “Component Function”), it hides the fact there is an object behind the scenes containing the component state, the documentation is littered with “don’t worry about this feature until after you have a performance problem, then come back here for the solution”, it’s very neat and tidy for tiny example projects but does not scale well as the project grows.
Using useMemo and useCallback to Save the Past from React Langoliers + Thoughts on React vs Vue vs Everything Else in 2023
Compare that with a system like Vue or Lit, which is much more intuitive, does the right thing by default, and is easier for existing HTML/CSS/JS developers to grok at a glance.
lmao I love that article, thanks for the link!
Ironically enough, I just got done troubleshooting some insane rendering problems that a
useMemofixedI’ve been meaning to scope out Vue and never heard of Lit - thanks for some weekend inspiration
Don’t forget Svelte. That said, traction means more developers trained in any tech stack, that’s why my previous company ditched Vue for React circa 2016, Vue seemed destined for oblivion and irrelevance at the time.
more developers trained in any tech stack
That is the primary argument my company used to justify forcing React. Do you know how many people we hired for their React experience? One. Everyone else was primarily backend or only had passing experience in React (not subject matter expert / does not know best practices). Meanwhile the rest of the team struggles to work in it (the frontend has become siloed) and very little of it follows best practice.
@smokinjoe An interesting reaction to react is Svelte: https://svelte.dev/. Instead of sending an entire application to the browser and making the poor client run all of it, do a crap ton of compute and calculation at build time. Send minimal code and computation to the browser. Totally different paradigm.
The reactivity of Svelte leaves a lot to be desired. The only difference between a computed property and a mutable property is
let x =and$: x =, both of which are declared in the same top-level scope and doesn’t provide much to distinguish them. The lack of reactivity on arrays and objects is a major foot-gun by default. The number of places they say “this looks weird, but don’t worry it’ll soon become second nature” in the docs shows that they acknowledge it’s bad design to create code that is misleading or goes against the grain/standard for what behavior developers should expect (makes it confusing to work with and then use anything else, or vice versa).The
#awaittemplate directive is interesting; I’m not sure I agree it should be handled in the template instead of the script but if combined it would remove some boilerplateloading = true/falseanderror = 'message'variables from script scope.
