So, recently some fediverse admins (mostly Mastodon) and the founder of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko (Gargron), where contacted by Meta/Facebook for an NDA meeting. We know nothing about it, but we’re pretty sure that it was about this project92 thing that Meta/Facebook is creating to “compete” with Twitter.
So a lot of Mastodon admins already singed a pact to immediately block any Meta/Facebook activity in the fediverse as soon as it comes up. My Mastodon instance, fosstodon.org hasn’t singed that pact and I’m pretty worried.
The following image is an screenshot of Gargron and dansup (creator of Pixelfed) talking about this. These posts were deleted, even from the wayback machine.
I get this is the fediverse and we’re supposed to hate big tech and all, but this “everything Facebook has done is evil” is objectively wrong and such a Reddit take. Facebook’s biggest problem has always been the people that use their products spreading hate and misinformation and their lack of moderation at their current scale, a problem that every single social media has hit, including the fediverse (i.e. Beehaw defederating with lemmy.world). And honestly, with governments refusing to take a heavy stance on regulating misinformation should it really be up to tech companies on what can and can’t be shared on their platforms? Then there’s data leaks like Cambridge Analytica, but that was a ticking time bomb, because data privacy back then wasn’t a concern anywhere. I’ve worked in the data industry for a decade now and it was the fuckin wild west back then lol.
And then there’s the good shit they’ve actually done. The article you replied to (not behind a paywall for me for some reason?) talks about how they open sourced their LLM AI for research purposes. Their data center designed were open sourced to help other data centers hit net zero carbon emissions (they’re a huge contributor to the Open Compute Project). They’ve open sourced a ton of tools/languages as well.
WhatsApp is still fully end to end encrypted messaging and they’re pushing the same on messenger now (their WhatsApp site even has a whole section for local law enforcement telling them they can’t provide message data, a huge plus for Americans given recent abortion regulations).
Their targeted advertising has rightfully gotten a lot of scrutiny, but there’s a lot of misinformation behind it, like “Facebook is listening to my calls” and “Facebook is reading my message data”, which they’ve denied and there’s no actual evidence of. I have family with small businesses that wouldn’t have made it through the pandemic without their advertising platform.
I don’t think that they have any place in the fediverse, honestly I’d be surprised if they wanted in on it anyways, but in my mind they aren’t any more evil than any other corporation and the “Facebook is straight evil” attitude is just an attempt for Redditors to feel superior about their social media corporation choice.
If I were to guess this meeting was probably a job offer if anything lol.
Edit: Lol scratch that last bit, looks like Meta is coming to the fediversee - https://reb00ted.org/tech/20230310-meta-activitypub/
Facebook’s algo drives this. It’s a choice that they’ve amplified this content.
Can’t comment much on this one, so I won’t.
still because wasn’t it like that when they bought it?
Now, as in, they didn’t design it that way to begin with because it wasn’t the profitable thing to do. They have to compete with iMessage, and further, they gain just by being able to tell every cop shop “sorry can’t do it bro.”
Glad your family made it. Unfortunately, though, this is the masses not understanding how technology these days really works. They don’t have to read your messages or listen to your calls because they’re doing that all over the web and through their own users. The truth is more nefarious because for most people “listening to my calls” is scrutable, while adding tracking cookies across the web or computing social graphs based on your contact info being shared without your consent by a few of your friends, or doing some ML on every photo shared is not.
Agreed.
Disagree. Fediverse and it’s growth as it stands now is not good for Facebook, so they’re trying to head it off at the pass. I’d be willing to bet this meeting was a feeler for them and I hope Eugen and others are smart enough of to say basically nothing, and they’re continuing the grand tradition of embrace, extend, extinguish.
Is Meta evil? No. They’re probably not a standard deviation away from any other org in terms of how many are “evil” but their incentives today all align to a worse outcome for humanity. It’s kinda worse - it’s a collection of incredibly smart people compartmentalized enough from the “evil” the org does. Actually, don’t know that I would say “evil” so much as “sociopathic.”
Meta should get no passes, and be met with absolute scrutiny related to the fediverse.