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Facebook et al has had a horrible track record of creating a new app/service and getting people on board. Their 3 successes are Facebook, Whatsapp (bought), and IG (bought). Every time they've launched an app outside of these, they failed (IGTV anyone?).
The Fediverse is open.
They can create Threads on activity pub and hope that they can create a server that competes with Twitter. Go for it, who cares. You can choose to follow people there or not, or join or not, or be on a server that defederates from it or not.
That's the beauty of it.
Meta's userbase is diverse. It has good and bad players. No need to broadstrokes it. If people join the Fediverse via Threads, many will discover Mastodon, Lemmy, Kbin, Calckey etc over time. Discovery & community!
So, like... in conclusion or whatever... everyone needs to chill. IMO.
We know very little at this point. My view is βwait and seeβ. Little point in speculating about things now IMHO.
Makes more sense for Meta to create their own "Metaverse" than join an open-source network.
Instagram and Facebook already communicate, it won't be too difficult to include WhatsApp into that mix.
If they buy something like Mastodon, it would make better business sense to cut it off from the Federation and sync it with Meta's products instead.
Mastodon software is still open source under agpl-3. As far as I understand the license terms, every change to the software has to be open sourced. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Affero_General_Public_License)
mastodon gGmbH can still be sold, but my guess is that it wonβt be of much use to zuck.
That's really nice to hear, hopefully we can have our own little or bigger anarcho oasis without corporate greed
I mean everyone could just not federate with them, right?
I hate the fact that for a large number of people, this will be how they will be introduced to the fediverse and their view of it will be tainted by Meta. I also dread seeing Meta spam in my federated timeline. And I also fear Meta building its own proprietary features on top of the ActivityPub protocol, making the content generated with them incompatible with independent clients, and allowing Zuck to spread his monopoly to the fediverse as well.
Stay the fuck away
They'll probably adopt, adapt, and extinguish. So no, fuck 'em.
Mixed. On the positive, the fediverse is meant to be open for all, and the fact that it appeals to the corporate overlords means its demonstrated at least some degree of staying power. Further, this will bring far more people into the fediverse to interact and play with. On the negative, meta is a parasite, and most of us who are excited about the fediverse are going to gravitate to instances that defederate from Meta (and probably tumblr, too).
So on the whole? Its a neutral thing
It's fine and good. Normalize federation
I view them embracing federation as a good thing.
I also view it as important for the instances I wish to follow to never federate with them.
Can you personally block content from specified instances, for your own user? That would do it for me just fine.
Yeah as a user you can block a person or a domain, which was the intended first step, not pre-emptive defederating.
I thought the domain block was the domain of linked content? There's other reasons I would want to individuall block instances: for example, those which are primarily languages I do not speak. Nothing against the content, it just isn't useful to me.
People are being really hypocritical.
You want a free open source social network. But when people you dont like join it, you hate it. That is not how it works, its not how FREE in FOSS works.
Meta can join, they can do whatever they want. It literally the point of this social network. If you dont like it, then go to a social network that is not FOSS, but is heavily moderated, because that is what most of you really want.
"Freedom" can be used to justify lots of really bad stuff. Meta has too much money to be trusted, they WILL fuck the Fediverse up eventually for more profit on the first chance they get (and people with lots of money always get those chances).
And it's not just about morality and the fucked up stuff that's happened on Meta, Iike the Cambridge Analytica scandal. I stopped using Facebook years ago because of the low quality of the content being posted there. And last week I logged back in to sell some stuff and oh boy, the content managed to get even worse.
I don't want growth just for the sake of growth. We don't need big corporations getting involved.
A major company seeing the competitive advantage of joining the fediverse is a great development. I don't expect Meta to act in good faith, but it's an accomplishment nonetheless.
They wouldn't join. What's the point? It's not like the fediverse is currently big enough to concern them and if they did, they wouldn't want to share their users with the rest of the fediverse. If they do join, it will simply be to stomp out competition before it becomes competition. They could probably start a network and have more user than the whole fediverse in 1 week (not saying it would be sustainable).
They're already actively working on it.
I did my senior college paper on the fuckery that Facebook and Meta has caused and how harmful their data collection has been to American society. I will stop using any services that are bought up by Fuckerberg.
I do not want them in the fediverse and will not tolerate them for a second. The moment they form an instance is the moment I block their instance.
Fuck. Meta.
Mind sharing the TL;DR about your paper?
They handed data to bad actors who then targeted groups of citizens down to groups of 10 people on social media with hypertargeted "dark ads". These ads were only shown once and couldn't be found again.
This targeting was focused at all groups, all races/ages/demographics/political leaning but decently increased towards the green party candidate for a good second towards the end of the election. It was mainly positive towards Trump but focused heavily on all candidates to sow division.
In spending, if I remember correctly, Clinton spent like 8mil on social media campaigns. Trump spent something like 180mil.
Facebook facilitated and was complicit in all of this. They collected the data of how long we looked at things, where our cursors were, who we communicated with, etc. They benefited from all of this through the ads.
Random Facebook boomers and literal children joining reddit is what started the long and slow downfall of reddit. I assume it would work the same way with ActivityPub forums/blogs/whatever
Screw meta.
Makes no difference to me. Those who believe they have privacy just because Meta and others don't yet have their own instance are mistaken.
I think we should let them consume Fediverse content but not create it.
If Meta proposes to let Instagram users follow people on Mastodon or whatever, that seems like a reasonable compromise - they get to keep people on their feeds viewing ads and we get more reach - but they shouldn't have the power to leave and take a large % of Fediverse content with them; if you want to make a post, you need to do so from a non-Meta-controlled instance in a non-Meta-controlled app.