#Barcelona, #Meta's Twitter competitor, will be ready by summer.
And lest you believe #ActivityPub integration was just some rumour, think again. In a slide, Meta confirms that Barcelona will indeed be decentralized and will be compatible with Mastodon.
Everyone who thought that AT protocol would easily win over ActivityPub, and that #Bluesky would kill Mastodon just because a few influencers joined doesn't understand the sheer marketing power and pull that Meta has at its disposal.
But believe me, I'm not exactly cheering on Meta here. Generally, where Meta goes, shenanigans happen. I simply don't think Meta is capable of releasing a product without dark patterns.
Nevertheless, I don't think the Fediverse is even close to preparing for what will happen once Barcelona starts federating.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews back around 2016 Meta then Facebook, which collects all our data whether on or off the site, let Cambridge Analytica have our data. I was swept up via a friend. I didn’t like the FSB having my data. If #Meta federated, it would try to collect our data. As I mainly played a game there, didn’t discuss politics and blocked ads, game over, left. As many #Trumpers so I would block, don’t trust Zuckerberg.
@atomicpoet@Em0nM4stodon@socialmedianews I’m less concerned about embrace, extend, extinguish than I am about being a non-consenting data point in their privacy-violation data vacuum that they use to sell ads with and enable genocide and human rights abuses with.
@atomicpoet Oh my god I hope I don't have to support fucking facebook in any kind of giant mecca-battle between behemoths as they battle together and destroy the city/internet as crossfire.
I understand that there are no good guys and it's a question of who is least worst but please please please universe can the closest thing to a good guy not be fucking zucking zuckerberg.
@atomicpoet@supernovae yeah they're tooooootally not gonna embrace, extend, and extinguish another open protocol. that could never happen twice. three times. four times, if you count "ruining the entire web" as one thing.
this is straight up bad news. if i wanted Meta to store everything i ever touched and use it to show ads to me and everyone i talk to, i'd still be on Facebook.
@vyr
> if I wanted Meta to ...
Generations of published news, blogs, (e-mails?), code, all have been swallowed up to create "AI". Public fediverse posts can be swallowed up too for advertising, nothing can be done about it (even if you host your fediverse instance yourself). @atomicpoet@supernovae
@supernovae@atomicpoet okay cool. they have what, ninety thousand employees after the most recent layoffs? if they task, like, twenty of them to work on doing what they want done to Fedi, that's more full-time developers than all the major instance servers put together. with compute and financial resources that most of us have only seen at work or in dreams. and a potential user base of "everyone still using Instagram" that is one SSO signin away. quite a lot to swing around.
our best hope is that they don't manage to overcome the image of Facebook as "where your racist grandma hangs out" and IG as "where TikTok memes go when they're over" and their AP product fizzles before they do too much damage.
@supernovae@atomicpoet i'm a little less worried about Tumblr because it's already a massive money sink for their parent company, and not particularly worried about Mozilla because they're not a pre-existing social network and have no committed user base to sling around. neither company is as absurdly aggressive with advertising and reselling data as Meta, or as large. still not great though.
@vyr i’m wondering about your assertion that this is an Embrace Extend Extinguish play. i think i agree, but do you have a reason why you think this is the case in particular?
@austinha it may or may not go down that way. they may not bother with the full EEE if they don't need to entirely kill the current Fediverse to keep people in their apps. all they need to do is provide Fedi experience that's better than most of what we have today: no need to pick an instance, more polished app, more powerful server-side features like search, trends, and recommendations, and all you have to do is put up with these ads…
on the other hand, AP (and the apps built on it) does have a lot of issues and ambiguities, and we may see them get resolved in a way that suits Meta and everyone else will need to put up or shut up, in the same way that fully breaking compatibility with vanilla Mastodon is a risky move today.
@vyr thanks for such a thoughtful response! I think I can say that I agree on all counts here.
Where my mind goes is the same place that it goes in relation to discussions of bluesky: what is their end goal? And more pointedly, how do they see this as a profit center?
EEE makes a lot of sense if they feel legitimately threatened by the fediverse, but given the growth rates and orders of magnitude of difference, I guess I’m not sure why they even care.
@vyr@austinha
Meta doesn’t necessarily care about AP/Mastodon. They just don’t want a big commercial competitor to enter the space, i.e. Twitter/Bluesky. Just blunting their growth is probably enough for Meta to accomplish their goals, much in the same way that Instagram blunted Snap’s trajectory.
@atomicpoet
> There's a real war happening between ActivityPub and AT protocol
What I see is a multi-faction conflict, in which both AP and AT are high ground some factions wants to control. The conflict is between each of the corporate DataFarms (ie legacy social media) and each of the major factions in the fediverse, in the wider sense of the term (protocol-agnostic, pro-decentralization). Mastodon Inc, for example, is a fediverse faction, but has different interests from the rest of us.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews I'm so glad you are taking this seriously. I've seen some utterly bizzarre takes that makes me think the person whose post I read has either not been around long enough to not know the cycle, or they are being deliberately obtuse because we must pRaIsE tHe EnGiNeErS or something like that.
Does calckey have any means of defederating from servers? I've still got my Mastodon hat on when it comes to behind the scenes stuff, so it would be super cool to know if this was possible or not (no worries if it isn't though, I'm sure it can get supported soon!)
@atomicpoet
> Barcelona, Meta's Twitter competitor, will be ready by summer
That's a good reason to have the proposed fediverse conference later this year, rather than early next year. There's a poll on this here, closing in 2 days:
@strypey That's great. Sadly I cannot attend from Friendica as polls from Mastodon do not federate (I can only see the results of it). But shoutout to the poll!
@kris@atomicpoet@socialmedianews Technically, yeah, but it's a tiny shadow of its former self. I was a fervient defender of XMPP and I had no use for it when 90% of my friends stopped using it and almost everyone were elsewhere already. And before that, the ecosystem was held back by Google, who refused to implement key features.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews Federating with a data-hoarding, anti-privacy, big tech ad firm seems like a bad idea in any situation; Meta is no exception. If I was an instance admin, I wouldn't want to put my users at risk like that. Also, this entire thing reeks of EEE
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews Part of me wants to suspend any interaction with this entirely. I want nothing to do with Meta, and certainly don't want them possibly interacting with my instance on that thing.
Part of being open is having doors you can close, and this might just be the first big one I slam.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews We should be careful though. The strength of the federated cloud lies in having many smaller players all working together. Getting a player in the field that is almost guaranteed to take up 90+% of users is scary and might negate the positives of the Fediverse. The strength of many might become one strong one suppressing the other ones.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews
That creates a lot of questions for me, given that I don't like Meta in general - never had a FB or IG account. Once they start I will check how to stay secure of them - if necessary block each and every account from there or even put an lock on mine here.
@SusanneAmman@atomicpoet@socialmedianews It is not necessary to do block each account of Meta ir tu put the lock on your acvount. You can just block their domain.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews This is really bad. Anyone who knows the phrase "Embrace Extend Extinguish" probably gets that this is not good.
I've seen the argument that the Fediverse needs to roll out the red carpet to giants like Meta. We can do that & lose everything great about the Fediverse, or we can resist it & let Meta try their lunacy elsewhere.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews I remember when AOL opened up access to the broader internet, including UseNet. And because of that, I am not enthused about Meta suddenly joining ActivityPub.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews this is honestly fascinating, I hadn’t heard about this. I’m glad more competition is coming to the social media sphere and that these open source and federated protocols are gaining traction.
@atomicpoet@socialmedianews this has the best chances of completely killing the fediverse out of everything i've seen, definitely make sure to block this once it comes out yall
I'm pretty sure they'll just get this shiny new thing so that instagram users would have a text-based platform as well - as they can only share images there. The walled garden would come from the fact that you can still see people's images only on Instagram - I understand this will be a text-only app. And what will #Barcelona not have will surely be:
The ability to freely change platforms (i.e. move from #Barcelona to #Mastodon along with your follows and followers, like you can do even on Mastodon currently).
The ability to change to a different server completely, if you dislike the moderation or stuff (I recall @atomicpoet once said with his previous Mastodon account that it will be Federated, a few months ago, not sure if I understood correctly, but I don't think they would want to lose some users and their data to servers they do not control)
If memes, videos, and pictures can't be exchanged between Zuck's micro-blogging software and other established software such as Mastodon, calckey, and pleroma I don't really see the impact. I don't see many people from the fediverse side falling for the bait and giving up all that fedi freedom. This will feel to me as if Mark Zuckerberg's corporation squabbled whatever opportunity they had in their continued quest to monopolize an already fraught venture of monetizing people's social interactions online.
I think it might actually be an opportunity for the fediverse to recruit. One of the biggest draws of fedi I think is the freedom. We moderate ourselves. One can, also, choose whatever software(s), and features they contain, for one's needs here.
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