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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?
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.
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.
Pros:
Cons:
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.
To paraphrase from a bank robber - Meta is where the users are. If we want open source technology to grow, we need to have users. If you block Meta out of the gate, how do you get their users to transition? IMO, energy should be spent on strategizing how to get the users to transition to open source instances, not getting people riled up to block them immediately.
They will datamine any instance that federates with them. They have had so many privacy issues it would be insane to give them the benefit of the doubt again. A leopard can't change its spots.. Not to mention the NSA docs & Cambridge Analytica.
They have proven themselves to be a hostile actor on the Internet.
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.
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.
Screw meta.
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.
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 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.