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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!
a true person of culture!
"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.
My guess is that anyone attending will have to sign an NDA. That will make it hard to speak out against Meta joining the federation. If someone does say anything, the Meta lawyers will destroy them.
They did with the last one. That's why there's so much distrust about it.
What a horrible click-bait title. No one and nothing was "destroyed" here. He replied in a polite manner to a company whose goals do not align with his own.
What an absolute legend. Also, I do so solemnly swear that any instance caught federating with meta is going straight in my hosts file.
You have been warned.
share the list, I'll add them to my pihole!
I am looking for a new instance because my admin is on the fence.
Anywhere Meta goes ads will follow and privacy will flee.
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.
"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
To create an Instagram account, your identity has to be validated. I prefer anonymity. Once Meta gets their foot in the door, I guarantee they will try to bully the fediverse into doing things their way. Hard pass for me.
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.
I really hope that we'll be able to maintain a strong resistance and fortification against Meta taking over the fediverse.
A good response. Civlised and to-the-point.
I disagree.
I hope there'll be people discussing sensibly.
For example the question how the rest of the fediverse would like Meta to act, when / if they have the by far largest instance on Fediverse with Threads.
Should they Rate-Limit queries from their users to other Instances, as to not overload them? This would protect other instances, but make the federated experience worse, driving more people to threads.
Would the Fediverse rather that Meta mirrors images etc on their servers too, or pull those from the original server?
Maybe they have UX ideas that would be useful to have somewhat uniform (like the subreddit/community/magazine stuff here), and would like input on them.
Of course just blocking them is an option for the fediverse, but doing that blindly seems like a missed opportunity for both sides.
More freely available content would be great, wouldn't it?
Maybe they have Ideas on the protocol, that they want to talk with admins about as a first step to gain more perspective. And certainly they are likely to be data-hungry greedy shit, but there is a chance that they are actually good ideas - there are actual people working at meta after all.
There's tons of ways in which this could be useful, and I don't really understand the completely blocking approach I see a lot of.
They want to use ActivityPub, that's awesome, finally something new and big that uses an open freaking standard on the web. What are the downsides? If it sucks for communities they can easily block Meta.
Yes, Meta is not a Company working for the betterment of the world, certainly.
But maybe, just maybe, goals align here, and Meta can make money and improve the Fediverse and the Internet with it.
And certainly, maybe they want to "take over" ActivityPub, and that would indeed be bad. And even then, wouldn't knowing because they told you be much better than knowing because they're meta?
So, if they want to change the Protocol, be very, very wary of their proposals. But even there there they could just want reasonable improvements because they suddenly deal with 100x of the next biggest instances.
tl;dr: when you tell people what you'd like them to do, it increases the chances of them doing that.
Of course just blocking them is an option for the fediverse, but doing that blindly seems like a missed opportunity for both sides.
More freely available content would be great, wouldn’t it?
The issue is once you open these floodgates you're not going to be able to close them, at least not without alienating a vast majority of users on both sides. Furthermore, once meta gains the majority of users and content on its instances (and this is really more of a "when", not "if" situation), they can start making changes to AP and overall infrastructure and forcing other instances to either adapt to that, or get left behind one by one, similar to what google does regardless of W3C and other browsers have to adapt even though it goes against the agreed standard.
If meta gains a foothold in the fediverse and eventually start isolating the smaller instances, it's going to be the email situation all over again, we'll have just a few large trusted providers and the rest will be a seemingly unsafe niche that most people avoid. Giving them the benefit of the doubt is just foolish, meta will not let a few fediverse admins dictate their policy (even assuming they have the backbone to stand up to them, and considering the recent meeting/NDA/"shareholder" drama most of them definitely don't).
Better to nip it in the bud than let it fester like a wound. Give companies as evil as meta an inch and they'll take a mile.
This is super naive. Facebook/Meta has zero interest in "playing nice" with competitors in any field. Their intentions with the fediverse are not pure, and you're a fool if you think otherwise.
This is capitalism, and this is one of the most profitable corporations that has ever existed on the planet. A corporation who has made those profits almost entirely from the private data of its users (and even some users that aren't subscribed to their service. That's how much data they have).
They don't "work together" with competitors "for the good of everyone." That's a pipe dream.
Respectful post, but respectfully disagree. The longer the fediverse can stay free of monetary-driven communities, the longer it will last. Wait until the proposals for blue check marks and karma hit the ActivityPup "plus" standard and it's too late for the platform.
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.
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.
I need meta to just stay away from the fediverse forever
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.
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.
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.
Gross, this is obviously their attempt to embrace, extend and extinguish the Fediverse.
Meta could probably mitigate at least some fears about this if they did any planning or discussions out in the open.
I get they want to have a massive "reveal event" or something, but come on...
It's entirely possible (but perhaps unlikely) that this is a passion project by some engineers and Facebook is just sponsoring them "hands off".
I wonder if Gab was invited. It would be hilarious if the only instances willing to federate with Meta were Nazis.
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.
I don't think they "destroyed" Meta. Meta was polite and they were passive aggressive? What is there to celebrate?