It shouldn’t be an issue that some admins are taking a strong, pre-emptive stance to #BlockMeta whilst others play a waiting game.
The great thing about the Fediverse is that we can decide to move and join an instance that aligns with our own position and values. We should celebrate this flexibility.
The one thing that will serve #Meta’s interest is if we
instead divided ourselves to wage a destructive #Fediverse war of words over its plans.
FWIW - I despise #Facebook and its more recent metastasis. Reasons include but are not limited to facilitating genocide and helping fascists get elected.
I left that platform over a decade ago for these reasons.
And it may turn out that #BlockMeta is the only option.
But I’m not quite there yet, and I’m interested in learning about what other plays might be available to use a small window of opportunity to turn this move against them (cont’d)
@stefanf28 ito "turning this move against them", I think it would be good to specifically NOT block Meta, but for people all over the fediverse to follow Meta users en masse. Because the culture is to follow back, many Meta users will do just that.
So we'll have a ton of Meta users following a ton of fediverse users and being exposed to what the real fediverse is like, which provides a perfect opportunity to convince all those users to migrate their accounts into the fediverse proper. :-)
@GrahamDowns yep - and in the meantime we work to make those migration tools even better.
I think there is always the risk that this may end up being futile, but blocking and defederating will remain an option at any given point, so worth a try I reckon.
Then you have to factor the $$$ clout in also.This translates to server resources, ad campaigns, paid moderators,bribe money to bend protocol/legal decisions in their favour.
Etc etc.
Hope dies last, but I'm just gonna say here: the odds do not look super good for a "fediverse favorable outcome" with this.
@kaasbaas@stefanf28@GrahamDowns Agreed. I think we need to accept we're not going to beat them at their own game, and we should also stop trying to be the "open-source version of X" all fedi elements currently are.
Take the radical route and be completely different.
Plus, "open source" is actually a con for a lot of people. They see it as clunky, difficult to use, and overly technical. And they feel like they can't make money off it (in this case, they're kinda right, because on Meta platforms, they can run paid ads and see proper stats on who's viewed and clicked on their links, etc). :/
You can't target fediverse users. I mean, you can see who they follow publicly and who THOSE people follow publicly. You can see what they post about, and what they boost and favourite, and try to make inferences off that. You might even be able to infer their location from their IP address (but I don't think that info is publicly available via the API). But you can't even reliably determine their age or gender. And those data points are crucial for targetting... which is probably why Twitter ads have never really been successful.
But as someone else said on Mastodon earlier today, we don't actually KNOW anything, let's not forget. It's all still pure speculation.
@stefanf28@GrahamDowns but this hypotetic migration will be possible? As good as I know migration is not part of ActivityPub, but an own development of the Mastodon software. Why should Meta implement it in the own software?
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