On the one hand I can totally understand this reaction by Kev, on the other hand, by completely locking off all discussions like this, means that there's no way to change things for the better.
Granted, it's Meta, they're not to be trusted, but still, a discussion, if one has the time, wouldn't be too bad an idea.
Meta intends to harvest content and kill off competition before it poses a threat.
I'm sorry, but it's on Meta to come forward to the public Fediverse and be open with their plans, not try to organize some hush-hush meetings with Mastodon instance owners.
Connectivity on fediverse platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy rely heavily on trust between users to maintain an engaging community. Unless Meta publicly demonstrates otherwise, people are right to distrust Meta at the outset, given their past and current affairs.
Meta's P92 should release itself on the Fediverse's terms, rather than Fediverse catering to Meta's terms. Otherwise, Meta should just make their own platform and see if Fediverse instances latch onto it.
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.
Personally, I'm not planning on using the Meta service, but I'm not a fan of pre-emptive defederation either. The vast majority of P92 users will have 0 clue what federation/activitypub is, let alone actually log into Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin, etc. For them, they will forever think of themselves as @username, not @username.
I'm totally fine with Meta releasing an app who's posts are exposed via ActivityPub, along with being able to consume other posts via ActivityPub. If anything, I would like to think it'll drive more people off the Meta platform and into Mastodon, as moving to a federated app doesn't mean they have to completely break connections with their network on-platform with Meta.
Overall, I'm more in favour of allowing a personal user to choose to defederate from specific instances, because regardless of what happens, if Meta joins, there will be other companies getting on the bandwagon, and endlessly splitting up based of which instances federate with which others will eventually lead to the whole damn thing falling apart and the big players becoming the de-jure instances anyways.
I mean, the vast majority of Lemmy/Kbin users migrated from Reddit, as did the vast majority of Mastodon users from Twitter. I'm fine with keeping things open to help facilitate more user growth to community run instances, while also having a place for the less tech-savvy to get their feet wet.
The vast majority of P92 users will have 0 clue what federation/activitypub is, let alone actually log into Lemmy, Mastodon, Kbin, etc. For them, they will forever think of themselves as
@username
, not@username@meta.com
.
There's an argument to be made that that's exactly why everyone else should defederate preemptively.
along with being able to consume other posts via ActivityPub
I read a new article that said it remains to be seen whether P92 will allow users to see posts from other site (they'll broadcast to ActivityPub but undecided about displaying contents from federated servers): https://tech.co/news/meta-decentralized-social-media
A source close to the project also told MoneyControl that “the plan as of now is that the MVP (minimum viable product) will definitely allow our users to broadcast posts to people on other servers”, but admitted the company is yet to decide whether to allow users “to follow and view the content of people on other servers.”
If they only broadcast, but not displaying contents from other servers or allow their users to follow people from other server, then what's the point of adding federated support if people from other servers can't interact with them?
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?
"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.
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!
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