US tech giant Meta has been hit with a record €1.2 billion fine for not complying with the EU’s privacy rulebook.
The Irish Data Protection Commission announced on Monday that Meta violated the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when it shuttled troves of personal data of European Facebook users to the United States without sufficiently protecting them from Washington's data surveillance practices.
#P92 is equal parts scary and exciting. What gives me hope is that while the product is dictated by the deeply untrustworthy #Meta company, it’s being developed by engineers who are amenable to the #OpenSource ethos, as evidenced by React, Docosaurus, RocksDB, PyTorch, LLaMA etc.
If you believe in the #fediverse like I do, you’ll see we have a far more compelling story for fellow techies to come along with. If we make it easy for them to do the right thing, it’s harder for Meta to do wrong.
I met a #Meta#facebook contractor today who said that their recent #layoffs affected mostly Full Time Employees, but spared contractors. This comment came from this person’s manager, who appeared to have had to lay off FTEs but not contractors in his org.
So while one key piece of the #Fediverse is that entire instances can be blocked as a form of moderation, and keeping things safe for people. I think it should be clearly stated to newcomers to any instance if entire platforms such as #Meta / #Tumblr / #Medium / #WordPress.com / #Bluesky (through a bridge) are being blocked.
If someone wants to have a federated identity and follow family/friends on Meta then they are SOL if an instance completely blocks the entire platform. #fediblock
@tim When you sign up for #Bluesky, #Twitter or #Meta you agree to give them a license to content you post. It is a very broad perpetual license giving them lots of rights to your content, including the right to sublicense. When you sign up for Mastodon, most instances do not take a license, the content rights you give them are defined in the privacy policy, and they do not include reposting your content to corporate sites that assume licenses to the content.
Whether it's #BlueSky or #Meta, I just do not understand how anyone can possibly give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their intentions with federated networking. Like, it's not like the internet is new. We have countless examples of what billionaires do with their power. They never try to make things better for us. They always try to accumulate profit for them at the expense of anyone else. How many times do people need to be fucked over before they learn?
I wonder if people threatening to block Facebook's/Meta's new ActivityPub-compatible social media network also automatically block emails coming from gmail.com.
I think the bottom line here is that some of us just want their own corner of the internet (fair enough), and some might be just too afraid of corporations ruining a good thing. And I get that. But look at Bitcoin, look at NFTs, look at the "metaverse".
Corporations don't always win, and we should not be afraid of them.
Meta joining the Fediverse by supporting ActivityPub will be a positive step in supporting their user's opportunity to see alternatives in social networking.
@supernovae
My point was just that it’s misleading to say #Meta will only be tracking people who use their app. Just like with Gab, with the #ActivityPub protocol and vanilla Mastodon’s implementation, being on a site that federates with them is likely to give them access to your data. @rolle
I'm not very sure about the consequences of Meta probably joining the Fediverse, and after I have read here a lot of posts and opinions, I would say that almost all of them are based on rumors. We don't even know what Meta is really planing, which protocols they want to use and in which extent, etc.
First of all I don't think that the target of Barcelona is to do interact (with good or evil intentions) with the Mastodon communities. They real target in my opinion is Twitter, a big social network/market, with a strong crisis due to its erratic management. Anyway I see a high potential of changes and colateral damages to our communities, and some open questions, if they decide to federate.
The first one is about the federation. If several hundreds of millions of new users enter the Fediverse though a single instance, which consequences would it have, especially for small instances? It is possible to handle? I'm thinking about the size of the account table, account cull and administrative aspects.
I suppose that the federated timeline will be monopolized by Meta due to the number of users they have. How can be it solved? If I good understand the concept of silencing, that would affect the searcheability of users of our instances for Meta users and opposite (that is, we would lose the maybe only aspect in which both Meta and Mastodon instances can benefit).
Data privacy and data ownership. Taking in account the reputation and past activities of Meta, can we trust that our data won't be used by the company? Is it any way to protect from it? Or the only solution is not to federate? I hope there is any middle path, but I don't see it.
If Barcelona uses ActivityPub, it is safe to expect that Meta will introduce modifications which are not compliant with the standard. I don't know how problematic they will be, a good candidate is to block possible migration from Barcelona to Mastodon, but I have to say that it is the last of my concerns.
Get ready — it looks like #Meta’s new #P92#Barcelona app that is “compatible with #Mastodon” that you can apparently log into with #Instagram credentials is coming out next month!
Can't say I understand why, but I'm glad the Chief AI Scientist at Meta is determined to convince everyone that the AI industry does not take trust and safety issues seriously and thus needs to be heavily regulated. 🤷♂️
@maxkennerly some people at #meta are very well intentioned even if they themselves are in the dark about all of the malfeasance at the platform over the last 7ish years.
@olavf some employees do generally good jobs but imo what’s happened on the platform as far as information warfare, extremism and conspiracy super spreading, turning reasonable people to mush brained meme addicts etc, has made it irredeemable. #facebook#meta
Whilst I am worried they will try the old “embrace, extend, extinguish” plan, I must admit I’m quite excited for #Meta to join their apps into the #Fediverse.
An extra 2bn people to talk to on here! And the ones who really enjoy it will find out they can switch to #mastodon or #calckey or one of the others for a similar experience but with no ads and better moderation. Nice!
@shauny I think you are a bit in the woods here. That would not be a perfect future. Or a very realistic one. Or any type of goal either.
Maybe some of us don't need the big platforms. Some of us left Facebook for a reason. Some of us don't want those people here. That's a choice and a rightful one. Not short slightness. Not everyone needs to have their own servers, but not everyone should either.