More worrying than that, when directly asked about this by the "Mastodon Migration" user, Rochko's answer was not "I did not sign any NDA", no "I have not met with them", no "I have not heard any proposal from FB", no "I haven't signed any documents", and sure as fuck no "I'm not considering selling out and betraying you all", no, he said just "I am not aware of any secret deals with Meta".
We have to assume he met with them, signed the NDA and is seriously considering whatever they're proposing, and there's rumors that they're gonna pay money to any participant servers, that would make them effectively vassals of Meta.
@jherazob
We can just hope, when the big split comes, that enough interesting ppl decide for the right side (imho for many others, it does matter sooo much tbh). @hedge@vfrmedia
@jherazob@hedge
If corporate and government powers want to control more of the fediverse (of course they do), they will approach the biggest instances first. If your instance is large, and you are not sure your instance operator cannot be corrupted, move to a smaller instance or run your own.
What does this mean for the fediverse? I presume because it's split up into a million loosely connected pieces, we should be largely insulated from corporate invasion and interference. You can't get us ALL, motherfuckers!
Meta joins, and makes it super easy to onramp from instabook
Meta slowly starts not following the protocol, forcing the protocol to adapt since they have 90%+ of the users
Eventually, Meta decides to abandon the protocol, and from the perspective of their users, we just went offline
Same playbook Google used (XMPP).
The problem is human nature. Content, activity and funding for development will drop off very hard and it'll likely become like XMPP is today, aka bloated, a mess of standards and basically forgotten about.
Meta just want to suck all they can out of a promising technology and it isn't their first trip at the rodeo. See Occulus as well. People are right to want to keep Meta at arms length.
Google didn’t add any proprietary extensions to XMPP, they just never updated their server software, while the ecosystem kept improving. For example, they stuck to SSL2 while nearly all nodes required TLS1.2 for federation.
(E: For perspective,) Truth Social was just a mouthy startup for spreading hate, not a nearly trillion dollar company with a lengthy history of anti-competitive activity.
Information about their plans being in the wild but not formally announced adds all kinds of possibility for SEC involvement. You have to be very careful with how information is publicized to avoid insider trading or the appearance of it.
No, they don't. If you can't track where information is, the ability of people to act on a tip massively increases, and the enforcement is much more difficult.
They are effectively legally required to use NDAs when discussing future directions of their business. There may not be an explicit regulation you can point to, but when information is spread around without tight control and someone acts on it, the SEC can and very willingly does get involved. There's a reason it's effectively universal for any publicly traded company with meaningful legal representation, and it's because it's a ridiculous level of negligence to have those conversations without them.
If Meta is interested in joining an open platform based on open-source API standards then why not open meetings Does anyone wonder if Rochko would sell the Mastodon Foundation to Meta
I'm genuinely confused why so many people are reacting so quickly to this news like it's the end of Mastodon. We can't conclude anything just by virtue of the fact that he signed an NDA. We don't know the terms of the NDA. It could simply be that he can't talk about Meta's specific plans.
More to the point, as the originator of the network and the one in charge of the source code, I feel like it's his responsibility to be informed of what companies like Meta are planning to do. If an NDA is the price of admission to that knowledge, and provided that the terms aren't egregious, he should go.
The thing people don't seem to understand is that you're always going to have to sign an NDA when talking to a company about unreleased products or features, regardless of which company it is. It's standard operating procedure. I've been avoiding Mastodon for the past week since there's so many bad takes that have started trending.
Yep, agreed. I’ve signed multiple NDAs at my company recently just to evaluate some tools that have been on the market for years. It’s not what people seem to think it is.
From his own comment, he's signing the NDA because it's the only way to find out what Meta want, and he figures knowing is better than not knowing. At no point has he indicated that he's going to work with them at all, and an NDA doesn't give them control or any guarantee of cooperation.
£5 says he comes back and says "I can't discuss details because of the NDA, but... no" and it goes no further.
If you don't hear what they want to say, then you find out what they're planning when they start doing it to you. Signing the NDA imposes no obligation to agree or cooperate. There's nothing to stop you from signing, listening, saying no, and walking away. I don't know for sure that's what's happening, but we also don't know that it's not what's happening.
Refusing to even talk to them does send a message, I agree, and listening gives them a chance to convince you. Still, I can understand that some would rather take the risk in exchange for a little advance warning of whatever it is.
Eugen isn't the Fediverse. At least for the Twitter Exodus most Masto instances used a fork that allowed for longer posts than Eugen liked. There's 0 reason to care about what he's doing, he can't control the network.
I personally think it's a bad idea, but I will try to judge the action instead of the person given how dedicated he likely is to the fediverse in general
Great, just what we needed. Looks like he ignored the risks of facebook (or meta, i still prefer to call with the already stained name) killing the fediverse. Hopefully nothing comes out of this discussion.
So what if he doesn’t talk to them? The protocols and code are available for anyone, and instances are open for federation. Facebook could, without any sort of consultation, deploy their own instance of Mastodon with their own fork of the code and keep all their changes to themself. If they’re going to do it anyways, it’d be better to work with them on it.
Mastodon is AGPLv3. That means if you allow someone to communicate with a server, you must offer them the modified source code. Not just when you distribute the modified code like in the GPLv3. So even if they forked Mastodon their code modifications would need to be made available.
However iirc ActivityPub itself is under a more permissive scheme (I think it's predecessor was using the MIT license?) so Meta could use the protocol itself.
To get around that they’d have to do something drastic, like getting the owner of the code to change the license in next release, and keep him in an NDA while doing so in order to position themselves when the change happens.
getting the owner of the code to change the license in next release
AFAIK, all contributors need to agree in order to change the license of a codebase. If a contributor disagrees, their part of the code has to be rewritten with a clean room implementation (ie rewritten without looking at the original code) in order to comply.
It's not about getting the code. They have the code, have for years, and hate it because it forces an open system.
This is about forcing people in "positions of power and authority" over mastodon/lemmy/kbin servers to conform to facebook's wishes so that they can destroy a competing platform.
Google XMPP or Microsoft Word Document style.
It's been done before, the only reason for people to cave now is they're getting paid.
People tend to forget things quickly, especially if they can communicate with their friends and family from Lemmy. Sooner or later, everyone will give in and just federate with Meta.
That will eventually lead to code changes to cater to Meta’s needs, those changes might not be made public (Mastodon is LGPL 3.0, if you don’t release the binaries, you don’t have to release the source), and those changes will eventually lead to telemetry gatering, incompatibility issues, etc., and that will eventually lead to people steering away from Mastodon… Lemmy and KBin might be soon to follow.
That sounds very pessimistic, I hope that won't be the case, at least it seems like the mastodon instance I'm on will block it from the start, so that's at least something.
I hope they do. One of the main reasons I am here is to get away from FB, not to see more of it. FB is a cesspool, there’s nothing good there any more. And this place will likely turn into that if you allow FB users to mingle.
I’m skeptical that Facebook would want to openly federate with externally controlled services because it’s kind of wild out here by design. However, if they did there would also be upsides. Those people who refuse to use anything but Facebook could be reachable without the rest of us having to go to Facebook, and people who only use Facebook because that’s where everyone else is could migrate away. Platforms opening up is a good thing.
I doubt Facebook would run Mastodon if they wanted to federate. They have an existing system with existing data and they have plenty of development resources to bridge that to ActivityPub. If Facebook did want to run Mastodon for some reason, even if they did open source their changes, which they probably would since they have a history of working with open source, the big changes would likely be unusable for most servers because Facebook scale is completely different from the typical Mastodon server. It doesn’t make any sense for a free Mastodon server with less than a million users to deploy the same kind of infrastructure that Facebook runs for 3 their billion monthly active users all over the world.
Exactly. Volunteer moderation in the Fediverse can't really compete with paid moderation at companies like Meta, which have to moderate significantly more posts. I'd guess that FB and Instagram get more posts in one month than the entire Fediverse has ever gotten.
I doubt he's ignoring anything. And I know nothing but I think it's a little unfair to bash him for this.
Meta does not need the Fediverse to create a ready-populated instance all of its own. It doesn't need to federate with anyone, it can probably kill Twitter and Reddit with a single stone (if it pours enough resource into moderating and siloing). Just stick a fediwidget in every logged in account page with some thoughtful seeding of content and it's done.
The danger of federating with Meta is much the same as not federating. It has such a massive userbase it will suck the lifeblood out of everywhere else whether or not it can see us.
The possible silver lining is that there are other very large corporates which can do the same (some of which have said they plan to). We could all end up with multiple logins on corporate instances simply because we have accounts with them for other reasons. And that means a lot of very large instances with name recognition, and easy access, making it much harder for any of them to stop federation and keep their users to themselves.
Being federated with one or more behemoths might well be hell. Some instances won't do it. Moderation standards will be key for those that do. But multiple federated behemoths can hold each other hostage because their users can all jump ship to the competition so easily.
This is much, much more complicated than just boycott or not. They cannot be trusted one tiny fraction of an inch but this is coming whether we like it or not. We need to work out how to protect ourselves and I'm starting to think that encouraging every site with a user login to make the fediverse a widget on their account pages might be the very best way to do it.
there's an argument that it's better to know rather than not know. i understand the ideological stand against Meta and everything it stands for, but it's easy to judge from the outside looking in. we don't know what he knows
Knowing is useless if you're contractually obligated not to act on that knowledge. When the devil offers a deal, the wise say no, because nothing good can come of it.
Reading this article I was constantly reminded of how Apple has designed iMessage in order to create an “us versus them” mentality. The amount of vitriol that some Apple users will direct at SMS texting is saddening.
xmpp was systematically killed by Google by “embrace, enhance, extinguish” where they federated, added bells and whistles, then de-federated after having essentially all users.
meta systematically removes competition. It is naive to assume anything otherwise, and both meta and the fediverse is international, so governments have less ability to enforce (and enforcement via govs are mostly via the elite and interest groups)
control over the fediverse can be lost to big tech via updates to protocol that can’t be bug fixed fast enough, a fork being run on big instances via a compromised sysadmin selling out for cash or other benefits
link sharing is about interesting content (not social inertia like messenger apps and social apps like Facebook) so it is not a perfect analogy.
there is no negativity on the fediverse yet
once users become the product (even partially), the fediverse will be driven to enshittification via the same pressures of big tech
Ugh. This crap makes me want to become a Luddite. I wonder if I can move into the Unabomber's old cabin in the woods. (I promise I won't make any bombs!)
friendly reminder that Luddites weren't opposed to technology, just wary of its misuse and how it was going to benefit the people higher up rather than the workers.
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