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Is Meta coming to Fediverse?
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2023
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Fediverse
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Are mastodon users really going to to use meta alternatives? Isn't the purpose of the fediverse to escape corporations control?
Why would anyone in their right state of mind, go from a free alternative (as in free speech, not free beer) back into the hands of a corporation?
No but it will make some people stay if they can still follow the "cool" people that left from their Instagram account.
I don't think Facebook really cares about attracting the current Mastodon/Fediverse users to their new social network. I think they have chosen ActivityPub for two reasons:
They want a product to compete against Twitter. And with Musk rapid enshittificating it, they need to act quick. ActivityPub is open source and proven to work, so Facebook has less work to do, and can release their new product sooner.
The main downfall of Twitter is advertisers leaving the site because they don't want their ads next to hateful comments that are now allowed under the new management. But this is a problem that can be neatly solved with defederation! Each advertiser can have their own instance (instance-as-a-service provided by Facebook), and they have more granularity in decided in which parts of the network they want to participate, and which parts to defederate. Sure, we the original denizens of the Fediverse will defederate from anything Meta, specially from ad instances. But most of the users of this new Meta-fediverse will remain in their Meta-approved instances, oblivious to the world outside them.
I could see Facebook making instances as a service for sure. And hosting their own instances they could scrape data from others (which will get them defederated quick, hopefully). But just having a nice clean signup system from a company people know would go a long way to getting people to join the fediverse, and hopefully people would eventually leave
What will happen is Meta will give someone a giant teddy bear just like they do at the State Fair. Then everyone rushes to try and win the giant teddy bear but can never seem to win the ring toss no matter how much they click.
I think they’re targeting Twitter and other corporate social media users
People are missing the real benefit here entirely.
No one has to go back to corporate social media (and no one should - in my opinion), but Meta's new microblogging platform joining the fediverse means that you can consume content from their users without being on their platform. If even that is too much for you, then by all means, defederate from them, but frankly I don't see the point other than as an ideological protest.
The fact is that fediverse data is already public, and Meta could (and probably is) already "scraping" it (though the word "scraping" doesn't really apply with activity pub) for sale-able data, so the privacy concerns are moot. This change just means more content for the fediverse, more news media posting in a way we can access, and an easier transition for new folks.
Frankly, I see only upsides, though I know that's an unpopular opinion on the fediverse
I don't think it's something to take that lightly. Problem is the EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish) that corporations are so good at realizing. The ActivityPub protocol the Fediverse is built on is public so anyone can use it. There's nothing to stop corporations from using it however they want. They can exert influence on ActivityPub much has they have on public standards in the past. That doesn't mean we should happily allow their profiteering to infiltrate our communities. It will destroy them.
Well, it's obvious that any public data can be "harvested" by anyone, but with federation there's also the thing that data gets replicated among all the federated platforms so that each server has actually a copy of that data on it.
I wouldn't want my posts being stored on their server as a consequence of being federated with them.
Wanting to avoid them and then go getting their content nonetheless, doesn't seem very coherent to me.
That's exactly how Embrace Extend Extinguish works.