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.
Yes but AFAIK they’re not being systematically ingested by Meta. I assume that’s their goal here.
They probably are by Google at least to index them for search and whatever else they are doing. Same by Microsoft for Bing. Who knows who else is doing what.
And I guess this is an inherent flaw with the fediverse. We still don’t really control our content.
Well, you can’t really have it both ways. There’s tons of content on Facebook that isn’t indexed by anyone and good luck using search on that site.
You can either have the walled private garden, or you can have an open forum.