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Kev Quirk, one of the admins of Fosstodon (a Mastodon instance), destroys Meta in an email exchange. (fosstodon.org)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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The exchange is about Meta's upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!

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[–] 18 points 3 years ago (1 child)

That's nice and all, but before we get to any of this there's a fundamental incentive schism to overcome first. People flock to the fediverse because they are tired of being treated like cattle. If you are not the paying customer, you are the product. And you will never--NEVER--be catered to. That's the bottom line here.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago* (2 children)

    I agree. The Beautiful thing here would be that people sick of Meta could still go to fosstodon, and they could still talk to their niece on Metas Threads.

    I can't help but see that as a win for the people not on metas software.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago*

    The problem here isn't talking to Meta or Meta making a federated platform.

    Nobody can prevent Meta from doing that anyway.

    The problem is the need to push against the insistence of Meta to keep these meetings off the record. It's against the entire philosophy of something like not only fediverse but FOSS in general.

    If Meta wants good faith, they have to show it first.

    Notice that in the email, Kev gives his guidance as to the matter. Do whatever the fuck you want as long as you put people first and make a product for the purpose of serving them.

    This should be the attitude everyone should have first.

    We will accept you as long as you're bringing value to us, not the other way round, got that Meta?

    As long as any dev is taking this approach, Meta included, I'm supporting them. If someone is secretive about their intentions about a public service which is not a for profit endeavor inherently, I'll have a hard pass too.

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  • [–] 11 points 3 years ago* (3 children)

    How is it a win for me if I specifically signed up for a fediverse account to get away from data-hoarding, money-driven corporations like Facebook? I don't want Facebook to have access to my account information, posts and comments. I think you're missing the point about who this company is and the extent to which it is willing to go to get people's data.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    Fucking thank you. Are people really this gullible? Maybe I have a different perspective because I've been free from Facebook for like 15 years now, but do these people really think that Meta/Facebook wants to be nice to its competitors? Suddenly they're going to give up the business model that has made them one of the biggest, most profitable corporations that has ever existed on this planet, and do the exact opposite of what they did to get there? LOL.

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    I'm honestly questioning if TheYang is reading our comments or if they are just spewing the same talking points regardless of the arguments presented to them. It's baffling to see people so willing to embrace a corporation that has done nothing but exploit its users and their privacy.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I don't want Facebook to have access to my account information, posts and comments.

    I hate to break it to you, but the very nature of the fediverse (as a distributed network where posts and account information automatically get distributed to hundreds if not thousands of independent servers you may or may not be aware of, that do not necessarily have to honour your deletion requests) means that it would be absolutely trivial for either Facebook or any other random bad actor you could think of to have access to all of that, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

    This is an example I've given a few times, but if Meta were really just wanting to suck down data for the evulz (why they would do this I have absolutely no idea because it's not like they could use that data for anything), they don't need to start an instance amid a blaze of publicity. They could just go on Mastodon.social, sign up for a no-name account, grab an API key and suck down the contents of the fediverse in real time and that's the end of it. The fediverse is not private and its very nature means that control over one's own data is not quite as secure as ActivityPub advocates would like to pretend.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago (1 child)

    But that wasn't my point. It's not that I think that Facebook or Google cannot scrape Fediverse platforms/instances, it's that even if they do, they cannot serve targeted ads based on our activity here.

    We have different definitions for privacy. Since I'm active here, it should be clear that to me private doesn't mean hidden. I like how the EFF put it, in their article on the Fediverse:

    [T]he default with incumbent platforms is usually an all-or-nothing bargain where you accept a platform’s terms or delete your account. The privacy dashboards buried deep in the platform’s settings are a way to tinker in the margins, but even if you untick every box, the big commercial services still harvest vast amounts of your data. To rely on these major platforms is to lose critical autonomy over your privacy, your security, and your free expression.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    But that wasn't my point. It's not that I think that Facebook or Google cannot scrape Fediverse platforms/instances, it's that even if they do, they cannot serve targeted ads based on our activity here.

    This is another one of those things where Meta's claimed motivations for this don't seem to stack up.

    How exactly are Meta supposed to serve "targeted ads" to me, @bloonface, if I am on finecity.social and not [whatever Meta's instance is]?

    If I don't have an account on their service, and never visit their website, they have no opportunity to put a tracking cookie on my computer, no opportunity to serve an ad to me (other than directly messaging me, behaviour which would absolutely get them defedded instantly by anyone who is even close to being on the fence about their presence), no link between my finecity.social account and any Meta accounts I may have... what benefit do they obtain from this?

    Bluntly - how is this dastardly plan of theirs actually physically supposed to work?

    A lot of people seem to have ascribed omnipotent powers to Meta far beyond what they are actually technically capable of. They can't deliver you a tracking cookie or make your instance display a banner ad to you through ActivityPub, ffs.

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