They were bleeding users so they want some ways to tap into existing user pool and they think it is easy to get that by simply federating, but they are about to find out the hard way why it won’t go the way they want.
Why would you assume that? I think Facebook has reported a loss of users maybe one quarter, ever? They’re flirting with 3bn these days, as far as I can tell.
Well, like we’ve said elsewhere in this, they are orders of magnitude larger than the fediverse. Absorbing users or data is almost certainly not their motivation here.
They’ll make a bespoke federated service, collect all the data of their users (and all the people on other networks their users interact with), make it all shiny and fancy and add a ton of improvements most networks don’t have yet. And if they can reach a critical mass of users, they can track a huge cross section of federated activity, and force networks to play by their rules or lose access to their entire userbase. It’s the same thing google did to email.
Um, isn’t everything everyone does on the fediverse public? I assume it’s all being tracked already. By search engines as a bare minimum, but anyone else (including Meta) who does any kind of research/etc. And they don’t need to be federated to do it, they can just crawl the network with HTTP.
As for “forcing networks to play by their rules” I don’t see that happening, and Google hasn’t done it with email. Gmail doesn’t have enough marketshare for that. At best they’ve forced people to make sure they have good outbound spam filtering. That’s not just google, every email provider (including small on premise office mail servers) has that policy.
I’m not saying we should federate them (personally I’m undecided) but your explanation hasn’t convinced me.
Instance owners (can) see way more info about you. A rando scraping public posts can’t tell what device a user is connecting from, what posts they’re looking at and for how long, where to most effectively inject ads, and then correlate all that with gps and sound recordings they collect via their app they’ve convinced people to install.
The social media part of social media apps has always been the secondary feature. Something like 90% of users lurk anyway, the only way they’re getting data on lurkers is a man-in-the-middle attack.
I think most people currently on lemmy would agree, but most people aren’t on lemmy. Like it or not, if Meta started a fediverse instance tomorrow, 90% of the fediverse would end up going through it. They would just make it so easy that most people wouldn’t even know they were in the fediverse (which I still believe is a better world than how it currently is).
Then your choice isn’t just “do I join a meta instance”, but also “do I interact with users/communities” on a meta-owned instance? The upside will obviously be the amount of content (ex. populated niche communities) available. The downside is that Meta will mine anything and everything they can from you. I do think lemmy is architected in such a way that they won’t have lurking data because your local instance “clones” threads for lurking by local users, so maybe it’s not that big of a deal. DMs would still not be encrypted though, and meta certainly won’t endorse communication over matrix.
I think people are a bit confused about how this supposed “embrace, extend, and extinguish” thing is supposed to work, as well as how the proposed pushback is supposed to work and even how federation is supposed to work.
As others say, tracking is trivial and doesn’t require federation. “Losing access to their userbase” is what’s being proposed here as a solution, not a threat. And last I checked Google did not “extinguish” email and nobody using other email providers lost access to Gmail users.
I think people are reacting to “Meta bad” and assuming “anti-Meta good” without having a good grasp of why or how those things are supposed to function.
To the email point, it’s actually much more difficult to set up your own email than it used to be, exactly because google servers will not accept email from unknown providers that don’t meet their own standards. It didn’t extinguish email, true, but it did help centralize it around a handful of providers that can keep up to date with google’s whims to get reliable deliverability.
Okay, someone explain to me cus i apparently don’t have the critical thinking skills to figure it out on my own.
What does Meta want from joining the fediverse? What is the draw for them???
This was a very illuminating view from another post
They were bleeding users so they want some ways to tap into existing user pool and they think it is easy to get that by simply federating, but they are about to find out the hard way why it won’t go the way they want.
Meta apps have a couple billion users. The fediverse has maybe ten million.
I really don’t think that’s the reason they’re considering ActivityPub.
I assumed over the years that users count would have been evaporated, so do we have current user counts for it?
Why would you assume that? I think Facebook has reported a loss of users maybe one quarter, ever? They’re flirting with 3bn these days, as far as I can tell.
Just that I don’t bother to care about them for years until now that they are trying to mess with Fediverse.
Well, like we’ve said elsewhere in this, they are orders of magnitude larger than the fediverse. Absorbing users or data is almost certainly not their motivation here.
There’s a business strategy called embrace, extend, extinguish that they’ll try to use to snuff out the fediverse.
They’ll make a bespoke federated service, collect all the data of their users (and all the people on other networks their users interact with), make it all shiny and fancy and add a ton of improvements most networks don’t have yet. And if they can reach a critical mass of users, they can track a huge cross section of federated activity, and force networks to play by their rules or lose access to their entire userbase. It’s the same thing google did to email.
This reminded me of the fact that Meta creates “ghost” profiles for people who they know exist, but who don’t use Facebook
Um, isn’t everything everyone does on the fediverse public? I assume it’s all being tracked already. By search engines as a bare minimum, but anyone else (including Meta) who does any kind of research/etc. And they don’t need to be federated to do it, they can just crawl the network with HTTP.
As for “forcing networks to play by their rules” I don’t see that happening, and Google hasn’t done it with email. Gmail doesn’t have enough marketshare for that. At best they’ve forced people to make sure they have good outbound spam filtering. That’s not just google, every email provider (including small on premise office mail servers) has that policy.
I’m not saying we should federate them (personally I’m undecided) but your explanation hasn’t convinced me.
Instance owners (can) see way more info about you. A rando scraping public posts can’t tell what device a user is connecting from, what posts they’re looking at and for how long, where to most effectively inject ads, and then correlate all that with gps and sound recordings they collect via their app they’ve convinced people to install.
The social media part of social media apps has always been the secondary feature. Something like 90% of users lurk anyway, the only way they’re getting data on lurkers is a man-in-the-middle attack.
Also, Gmail is very strong in the email space. It doesn’t matter whether your server ever sends a single piece of spam, Gmail has a history of throttling mail servers’ ability to send to Gmail accounts.
Facebook will never know any of that about me, since I won’t ever sign up for their instance.
I think most people currently on lemmy would agree, but most people aren’t on lemmy. Like it or not, if Meta started a fediverse instance tomorrow, 90% of the fediverse would end up going through it. They would just make it so easy that most people wouldn’t even know they were in the fediverse (which I still believe is a better world than how it currently is).
Then your choice isn’t just “do I join a meta instance”, but also “do I interact with users/communities” on a meta-owned instance? The upside will obviously be the amount of content (ex. populated niche communities) available. The downside is that Meta will mine anything and everything they can from you. I do think lemmy is architected in such a way that they won’t have lurking data because your local instance “clones” threads for lurking by local users, so maybe it’s not that big of a deal. DMs would still not be encrypted though, and meta certainly won’t endorse communication over matrix.
On top of that, you’ll also have to make sure that your instance admins defed with Meta
I think people are a bit confused about how this supposed “embrace, extend, and extinguish” thing is supposed to work, as well as how the proposed pushback is supposed to work and even how federation is supposed to work.
As others say, tracking is trivial and doesn’t require federation. “Losing access to their userbase” is what’s being proposed here as a solution, not a threat. And last I checked Google did not “extinguish” email and nobody using other email providers lost access to Gmail users.
I think people are reacting to “Meta bad” and assuming “anti-Meta good” without having a good grasp of why or how those things are supposed to function.
To the email point, it’s actually much more difficult to set up your own email than it used to be, exactly because google servers will not accept email from unknown providers that don’t meet their own standards. It didn’t extinguish email, true, but it did help centralize it around a handful of providers that can keep up to date with google’s whims to get reliable deliverability.