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.

  • whofearsthenight@beehaw.orgEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Facebook’s biggest problem has always been the people that use their products spreading hate and misinformation

    Facebook’s algo drives this. It’s a choice that they’ve amplified this content.

    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.

    Can’t comment much on this one, so I won’t.

    WhatsApp is still fully end to end encrypted

    still because wasn’t it like that when they bought it?

    they’re pushing the same on messenger now

    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.”

    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.

    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.

    I don’t think that they have any place in the fediverse, honestly I’d be surprised if they wanted in on it anyways

    Agreed.

    If I were to guess this meeting was probably a job offer if anything lol.

    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.