@aral I’m all for blocking Meta. Part of what makes Mastodon so nice is that it’s free from ads and corporate/VC shenanigans. We’re trying to build a different model for the internet, both in structure and funding.
@aral I am not as well-informed about this as I should be. What’s so bad with Meta joining the fediverse? What else are other instances expected to do except to receive and send activity pub messages to Meta’s federated instance?
@vncntx At the beginning, nothing. Once #Meta/Facebook/Instagram’s #Project92 is the largest instance, they’ll start making “improvements” to the protocol. Other instances will have to implement them to federate. At that point, they’ll be running the show.
(If we let them. And by “we”, I mean the largest instances. mastodon.social and the other largest instances could nip this in the bud now if they wanted to. But I hear they’re out signing NDAs…)
@aral That attitude makes me quite uncomfortable. It seems like an overreaction to something that hasn't even happened yet. If #Meta wants to implement the #ActivityPub standard, let them. That's the point of an open standard. If Meta wants to contribute to its development, we should welcome it. Some good things have come out of Facebook Engineering in the past. Why not wait until they do something bad before taking action?
@aral@vncntx exactly this. for those of us that have seen this sort of thing happen many times before, (by many companies, not just facebook, but facebook have also historically been a culprit) we're right to be cautious.
Meta sympathisers: Fast forward two or three years and prove us otherwise
@paul@vncntx They don’t have to. They’ll write “oops” think pieces and do speaking tours where they recount how the fediverse was lost and how they feel terrible about the role they unknowingly played (“who could have known?… turns out…”) and how they’re now launching their next project to recapture the spirit of the early fediverse after quitting their job at Facebook/Meta/Instagram/whatever-the-fuck-it’ll-be-called-by-then 🤷♂️
@paul@vncntx (Meanwhile, the Small Web will be up and running by then so hopefully some of us at least won’t have to know or care about their bullshit.)
@aral I don’t mind them meeting with Meta to hear what they have to say, per se. I do mind them doing it under NDA. Goes against the whole open/community-run part of the fediverse.
@aral This will be an interesting test for the fediverse since multiple large corps are prepared to spend billions to find a way to sabotage it. The best way to maximise profits is to control everything, and they can’t fully do that in the fediverse. If they can’t own it, they’ll pay lots of $ to very smart people to figure out how to fuck it up.
@aral They will create nodes on the fediverse and then offer money to other nodes who join them, once they get enough pull on the network they will start introducing new "features" and then #EmbraceExtendExtinguish the fediverse. It's a story as old as time now.
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