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.
Sounds troubling. But not all of their actions turn out to be completely nefarious, and this could represent a genuine effort to contribute to the next generation of infrastructure. The emerging network protocol appears to offer an opportunity for both non-profit and commercial ventures.
I’m not particularly interested in anything that Meta/Facebook has ever created. Everything that this company has made or touched has been horrible/dangerous/terrible for everyone and I don’t think that this isn’t the case. Also that article that you linked is behind a paywall ._.
And that’s probably the wiser assessment, given their other activities. Here’s the relevant part of that NYT article.
Meta open sourcing their AI is great and hypocritical at the same time. Like yes we agree that AI shouldn’t be controlled by a couple of powerful American companies, but we still need to have full control over the algorithm that literally manipulates users internationally on a daily basis.
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://beehaw.org/post/636282
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They aren’t Nestle levels of evil imo lol, but yeah I think the problem with most corporations in general is the total lack of regulation and oversight. Ultimately social media is a tool, and allowing anyone to use it for any purpose is going to have shitty unintended consequences. But how do you reign that in at this point without the masses revolting at their loss of free speech? We’re in a mess I don’t know if we can unwind.
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.
Facebook’s algo drives interaction, human interaction with this content amplifies this content, just like pretty much every other algorithm. Ragebait sells unfortunately, but this isn’t anything new. Seen any news channel since the 24 hour news cycle was introduced?
This is a response to “everything Meta touches turns to shit”. WhatsApp is a fine example.
No, because it wasn’t a priority when Messenger was built in 2011 lol. Don’t rewrite history with what you know today, I don’t know if you remember the internet back then, but it was the wild west. Data privacy was not a concern to many.
This one is more subjective, because to avoid the tracking you can just not use Facebook. If they don’t have your personal information they aren’t tracking you, they only know some person somewhere interactioned on a site that has Facebook Pixel. They don’t even collect your IP address, hence why they use cookies for tracking here.
Not to mention this is all to sell targeted ads, so “evil” would be dramatic imo. Just a company doing what a company does.
This isn’t true until actual proof is provided.
Also subjective, just don’t use Facebook if you believe this to be the case. Their ML models don’t care about you if it can’t target you with ads.
“Meta is evil” is what I was discussing. Sociopathic sure, just like every profit driven corporation, but to change this we’d need to unwind our society from profit driven entirely, which I’m all for, but that’s a whole other conversation.
I’m just really hoping that this place doesn’t get obsessed with Facebook ragebait like Reddit did.
Facebook’s algo is a deliberate choice. If the only problem was with what the humans who use the service did, why doesn’t reddit, tumblr, instagram, or previous to Elon, twitter have the same level of drivel constantly circulating their top posts? On other corner of the internet, trolls like Dan Bongino don’t get any real traction because they don’t hold any views that most people actually have. On FB, at least around the last time I cared about looking, 5-8 of the top 10 posters on FB would be extremely niche on any other social media sites, and should be even more niche on facebook since they represent an extremely tiny piece of the real world and facebook has a far larger sample size than just about any other company.
Also, re: messenger encryption and not looking back with hindsight, another messaging app also came out in 2011 with E2E - iMessage. WhatsApp added support for E2E in August of 2012. Why did it take facebook so long?
On Facebook’s nefarious practices creating your social graph - I deleted my facebook account in like 2016. During the pandemic I, admiittedly, compromised my moral position on facebook and created an account to use marketplace. How, without me telling Facebook just about any real info, do you surmise they were able to suggest to me people I know IRL that I didn’t even know when I had a facebook account previously, while also using mostly fake info (slightly changed name, I think the only thing I used was my phone number and even that had changed since I’d previously used FB.)
Re: photos and “just don’t use facebook.” There is not really a way in modern society to really do that. I upload nothing to FB, but it’s already extremely difficult to not get people you know not to include you in pictures uploaded to social media, and tbh I don’t try because it’s just the default for most people these days, much less people you don’t know or don’t know well.
I don’t think discussion of Meta as a company can really go too far without turning into ragebait, and deservedly so. They’re basically the Ma Bell of the modern age, we just don’t have regulators with the stones to do anything about it these days.
Keep in mind XMPP had similar sorts of activity back when chat apps were the rage, and in the end the protocol was added to Google Talk (now dead), AIM (now removed), Facebook (now removed), and Skype (now removed). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP#Non-native_deployments
I suspect existing orgs will want to contribute just as long as it takes to steal users and build a garden, that they can then wall off.
The Silicon Valley way of doing things is “growth at any cost”. Of course Meta wants in on what might turn out to be the next big thing. Of course they want to use money and power to dominate the protocol, insert all sorts of monetization, and ruin the whole thing. And when it doesn’t work out because they’ve done the same dumb shit that already ruined Facebook and Reddit the protocol have been destroyed and rendered useless. Meta goes back to Facebook and Instagram while the entire Fediverse project becomes defunct.
This is the history of these companies. Thankfully “fediverse” is not something Meta can just outright buy and then destroy, but they can still throw their weight around with cash and the enshittification will quickly ensue. The Fediverse needs to resist. It’s hard to say no to money, but VC capital is what is destroying the internet. We need to do this differently if we want it to succeed.
You left out the part where they crawl the entire fediverse and hoover up data on everybody in it.
You should assume that has and is happening. Pretty much everything is public.
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Yes. I was thinking the same thing. XMPP is a great example. They could have all federated, but then they chose not to. This will be the exact plan presumably.
I see you have been paying attention. Past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior, so I would say your prediction is right.