I’m just curious what you folks think. The whole idea of the Fediverse seems to go against everything Meta has stops for with their existing platforms (Facebook and Instagram).
What are they after? Are they going to try and infiltrate it so they can get people’s data and content? Are they trying to monetize it? It just doesn’t add up. I feel like most people on the Fediverse already would agree that we don’t want Meta’s platforms to access our content.
Please excuse my ignorance if it doesn’t work like I think it does. I’m relatively new to the Fediverse myself.
There a post suggesting that it’s a EU law they are trying to avoid. It states that if a platform is large and a gatekeeper for information, then certain laws will apply. But by being in the fediverse that information is accessible by not-meta platforms, so the laws won’t apply (they will argue).
I am personally guessing it’s this option, people keep saying the idea is to EEE but I don’t think this would be the most effective use of Meta resources since they should be focusing yheir efforts at beating twitter.
What’s EEE?
Embrace, extend and extinguish.
It was a more common tactic back in the day for tech giants to destroy competition omfor open software specifically.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
2 birds, 1 stone…
I fully believe it has to do with moderation and wanting to offload the costs of moderation. Moderation is expensive and requires whole teams, but if they just direct that federated instances need to comply with Meta’s moderation standards, suddenly they’re not directly responsible (or legally liable) for that stuff. It also has to do with ads - once Meta becomes dominant, they can say “we will serve federated ads and you have to deal with it or defederate from us.”
Has anyone Defederated yet? Is Threads even live to Defederate from yet?
Afaik Threads hasn’t started federating with any instance so it’s still siloed for now.
I did on my mastodon instance. The known URLs are threads.net and threads.instagram.com. Threads is live apparently but not federated yet (that’s “coming soon” - I believe Meta pushed Threads early because Twitter is shooting themselves in the foot with rate limiting (individuals may not use TweetDeck but brands sure do).
What are they after: Money Are they going to try and infiltrate it: Obviously Are they trying to monetize it: Obviously It doesn’t add up: To them it does I feel like most people…: I’ve got some bad news for you
I think they want to destroy it. They don’t want us to have freedom away from their data collection and ad bombardments.
Best way to do so is to get in. Some one posted an article about what they want to do.
Here the article https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
This is why Mete wants in.
Holy shit thanks for the link. That’s a very good write up explaining why we should be very wary of Meta’s intents. And the wiki page link was gold. Fuckers truly want to Embrace and Extinguish.
You’re welcome. I thought it was a greart write up and help me understand what was going on as well.
Yes, a very good article. I have the feeling I have another peace of the puzzle now.
The bright side is that given the open nature of decentralized networks, nobody is forced to use whatever Meta shits out.
Not disagreeing per se, but for sites like Twitter and its clones, you go where the people you care about are. I have a mastodon account but I couldn’t tell you the last time I opened it because nobody I follow is there, and I don’t really care about following general topics or hashtags.
As opposed to a site like Reddit, the content is what matters, and I can get that content anywhere (RSS feeds, blogs, here, etc)
It seems so weird though. The fediverse is small. Extremely small. They are taking on Twitter. A million users on mastodon doesn’t matter when Twitter has 250 million.
Agreed. All this reminds me a little of some of the discussions that inevitably appear in professional-photographer circles whenever some online service with photo-sharing features changes its terms and conditions. Everyone is convinced that the giant multinational company is spending millions in a laser-focused effort to steal business from photographers, because “making money with photographs” is the lens through which they view the world. And from that point of view it’s hard to see that the entire industry of professional photography is too tiny to be worth Google’s or Meta’s time to even try to steal.
One of the things techngiants do is to get control of new startups and trends before they become big, and either consume them or destroy them.
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
And weirdly, a lot of startups have the goal of being bought out by a mega-corporation in a couple of years and live off of that money.
Which does make sense. Most people work to make a living and what a better plan is there than to make something that someone pays a ton of money for and stop working. Or after that do something that you want instead of have to.
If their reaction is this strong even though fediverse is this small, it means we have something incredible and should fight for it and prevent coporations from gaining ANY influence over it. I doubt we will get any more chances if we blow this one.
I agree that fediverse is only a few million. But the fediverse is also highly populated with refugees from twitter and reddit at the moment, who just want another stable and popular social platform similar to what they’ve always used.
If anything, the fediverse will have people with stronger opinions: either they’re willing to change social media because of a couple bad changes (and aren’t too attached to the fediverse), or they’re hardcore fediverse fans who are less likely to move to threads than your average twitter user.
If we assume it to be a 50% split, then meta has a chance at stealing half the fediverse by promising a larger user base, thus more content, but on the false premise that Threads will be backwards compatible with the fediverse forever.
There was a big Lemmy discussion about that article 2 weeks ago too: https://lemmy.world/post/467454
I think that Meta is trying to beat Twitter on microblogging. Using ActivityPub, like Lemmy and Mastodon, is just a fast and convenient way to start up quickly. The Fediverse will suffer with Thread invasion, as “colateral damage”.
The same thing cancer always does: To spread and ruin.
*metastasize
Zing!
They don’t have to own the fediverse, they can just charge for access to it. People who are happy with a superficial view, will pay with their data to have a window.
They want your data. That’s it.
What do did they get by joining that any person can’t get just by scraping? I mean, everything we post here is public even the people who aren’t logged in, right?
Federation is the future of social media.
I know it, you know it, the original Twitter team knows it, and Meta knows it too.
Over time I think this will become increasingly clear to everyone, and as a new social network pops up every couple of months and social media becomes more fragmented, it will only become more important that people are able to communicate with each other across networks. Even the average normie out there who hasn’t joined the Fediverse yet because they think it’s “too complicated” or “don’t want to join something with servers”, is starting to look at services like BlueSky, Threads and Tumblr (which have all made some level of commitment to federation) and slowly beginning to understand the value of being able to follow people on completely different networks. And the more social networks that exist, the more valuable federation becomes.
I guess what I’m getting at is that Meta and BlueSky know that social media fragmentation and federation are not only on the horizon, but here today. Meta, Twitter and TikTok would be perfectly happy to have things continue as is, with them being the center of the centralized social media universe. But the biggest collective fear of every big tech company is sleeping on paradigm shifts caused by new, disruptive technology (like ActivityPub), and thus being dethroned by some new players.
I’d argue that the fact that Meta, one of the biggest and most powerful tech companies in the world, is now planning on adopting ActivityPub is a sign that the Fediverse is winning.
It’s kind of like the old days when we had AOL amd MSN, and initially the people didn’t realize that they were in containers and then they got a browser and the whole internet was sitting out there.
Disagree with a lot of the stances here.
Meta has been hit hard by a series of failures over the last decade.
Continually missing first place, the company has broadly pivoted towards more open partnership in order to boost their offerings.
For example, their LLM weights being released to researchers when the product was clearly behind OpenAI and even Google.
Playing nice with federated networks fits into this.
Meta is betting that open platforms do well enough to corner a non-insignificant part of the market and are hoping to leverage compatibility with it in order to protect and differentiate their fledgling product from competition.
None of this means they aren’t still going to try to siphon every detail they can to maximize ad revenue for users.
But they aren’t trying to kill or sabotage the fediverse (which they rightfully don’t seriously see as competition in itself). They are hoping it is successful enough that it helps give them an edge against walled garden networks backed by competitors’ money.
In general, expect to see more openness from Meta in the coming years for much of what they do. They finally realized they aren’t Apple and can’t get away with siloing their products within the market.
I can agree with all you are saying, while also agreeing with the stance that Meta’s presence is corrosive by its’ very nature.
There will be a sugar rush up front, diabetes down the road.EDIT: They WILL find a way to insert themselves more severely if and when this thing grows.
I think Zuck looked at the hosting bills and thought: “How do I get the suckers to host their own data while allowing me to control and harvest it?”
I think new laws in Europe have something to do with it. EU is trying to force the big platforms to interoperate. Facebook/Meta is of course one of the most targeted. So I think their thought is by signing on to the existing fediverse, they can say hey we are playing nice no need to regulate us further
Microsoft pioneered (or maybe popularized, not sure) embrace, extend, extinguish. I’m sure this is a version of that.
Honestly? Zuckerberg has always had an obsession with the next step as it relates to how people use the internet. He has a track record of trying to catch lightning in a bottle again and getting struck by lightning instead, to the detriment of his own company.
Just look at the Metaverse, he got obsessed with a relatively new technologies (vr and blockchain) and wasted billions of dollars chasing the same high he once got when Facebook took over.
Maybe he sees money in the fediverse, but i think Zuckerberg is just getting excited about a new technology like the rest of us. Unlike the rest of us however, he will likely end up spending billions of dollars continuing to chase that high that he got from Facebook.
Slightly sarcastic response: “What’s this federation thing? IDK but Facebook has it. I guess I don’t need to go anywhere. Thanks Zuck!”
My take is they see federated protocols as a threat, but they can’t compete directly with them. The next best thing they can do implement them to try and keep people in their walled garden. Even if it means punching some windows into those walls. However, they won’t implement the full protocol, only a subset. They may not even implement them correctly. Causing problems for anyone on the outside. Basically providing a support yet inferior experience for anyone still in the walled garden.
Those people will be none the wiser too. The average person doesn’t understand technology or protocols. As far as they know, they’re still be in Facebook.
