The exchange is about Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
“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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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An infamously vicious predator walks up and bares its fangs at us, and half of you want to pet it instead of fleeing for your lives.
It’s hard to overstate my disappointment right now.
Meta isn’t as cute as predators in the wild.
They’re the type to freeze instead of fight or flight
Freezing would actually probably be better, in this case I think its fawn.
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!
“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.”
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.
FB: We’re confused why someone would sign up for a social media site set up by somebody in their dorm room, tell us how to be more like you.
Meta also: forgetting how their original IP, Facebook started in much the same way.
I really hope that we’ll be able to maintain a strong resistance and fortification against Meta taking over the fediverse.
Only defense is to defederate meta and any instance that chooses to federate with meta
I agree, the decentralized aspect is a huge plus and makes this system . But I think the OP’s approach is fundamentally misguided and I have my suspicions for a few reasons.
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It’s a 45 minute meeting that provides an insight into Meta’s operations. There’s no need to contribute anything, just sit back and listen.
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There’s no reason to post about this and brag about it now. Compare this with what Christian did when Reddit tried to claim Apollo was blackmailing them. There’s no leverage now, just some internet points.
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We have one email and a response. Was there any further communication? How do we know this is all that was said? I could go further and question the legitimacy of this screencap but I’m willing to give OP the benefit of the doubt here.
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As others have pointed out, how does shutting them out completely stay in keeping with fediverse principles? This is legitimate question since, to me, it seems like despite the risks, it’s antithetical to the spirit of the fediverse until they demonstrate bad behavior here.
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To quote OP’s email, “Zero interest in having a conversation with #Meta 'off the record or otherwise.” “Otherwise” here is…on the record. So OP also won’t meet with them in a completely open meeting?
Look, I get it, I dislike Meta too. But this just seems like a misstep and bragging for zero actual gain.
- As others have pointed out, how does shutting them out completely stay in keeping with fediverse principles? This is legitimate question since, to me, it seems like despite the risks, it’s antithetical to the spirit of the fediverse until they demonstrate bad behavior here.
how much bad behavior do you want to see before accepting that MetaZuck is evil and has no go intentions?
There’s a literal trail of dead startups and bodies.
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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.
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
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
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
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? And we’re not even getting into how it sells your data behind the scenes to advertisers, government entities, and anyone else with a little cash to offer.
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.
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.
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
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.
I find it a tad amusing that this news about Facebook’s latest attempt at fucking over the Fediverse is where I hear about the pixelfed project for the first time.
