Don't be naive, people. #Facebook is only interested in collecting more data and to connect that data to profiles to feed to the ad machinery. If #ActivityPub can be used for that, they will give it a try. That's it. That's all. It's still Facebook.
Motivated by @jwildeboer echoing my scepticism of whether Meta will ever open up Threads, federate, and use ActivityPub - a poll. Will Meta ever do it?
I found today that there are some downside in being mostly in this amazing ad-free space that the #fediverse is. I check my Facebook account everyday for notification-only, as many people still use it sometimes to get in touch with me. Today, casually, I decided to scroll. And OMG.
Meta erwägt offenbar Abo für werbefreies Instagram und Facebook
Mindestens 10 Euro monatlich und dafür keine Werbung: Die Facebook-Mutter Meta erwägt einem Bericht zufolge die Einführung eines Abos zur werbefreien Nutzung von Facebook. Wer weitere Dienste, wie etwa Instagram nutzt, soll dafür zusätzlich zahlen.
What do you think happens when 200M FB users join? When Zuck can impulsively defederate, or add/change/remove features and rules, at will, and oh...10M non-FB users object?
Poked my head in on #Facebook this morning. Suddenly realized I have no idea how to social media anymore, what I should talk about.
Just as suddenly realized I really don't care...
There's not really a right way to be social on #Mastodon. I can just talk about whatever and at least someone will show appreciation for it.
My relatives not looking over my shoulder at everything I say also helps too.
So, #Meta is trying to join the #Fediverse with a new service and having some hush talk with #Mastodon admins now [1] ? Conspiracy? Viva la Resistance [2] ? Resistance is futile? Do we need to fear a #Twitter like buyout after all?
Let's have a look at what #ActivityPub [3] really is and what game #Facebook is playing (Spoiler: probably not the one, everyone is thinking it is).
The #DigitalMarketsAct mandates Meta to "enable end users to freely choose to opt-in to [combining or cross-using personal data] by offering a less personalised but equivalent alternative".
When I pointed out to Meta that by offering users to either #consent to #SurveillanceAds or pay € 275 per year for #Instagram & #Facebook isn't "equivalent alternative" they said, Meta has to do that because of #GDPR 😤 Really??
Wiecie, że na Facebooku pojawił się nowy typ konta, który nie wymaga od tworzącej go osoby podania prawdziwego imienia i nazwiska? Obstawiam, że to weszło wraz z DSA (choć istnieje możliwość, że wcześniej, a ja to zauważyłam dopiero po otrzymaniu pierwszego zaproszenia do znajomych z takiego profilu). W każdym razie dobrze, że serwis takie konta odpowiednio oznacza.
About Meta on the Fediverse :facebook::geodesic::
I have a lot of concerns about Meta coming soon to the Fediverse.
I fear what this means for the exchange of information that will inevitably happen between us and them.
What it means legally,
what it means technically,
but mostly what it means ethically.
I also fear for the culture we have developed here.
I have deleted my Facebook account 5 years ago and never regretted it. I do not have any other accounts with Meta. For many reasons, I intend to stay away from this unethical corporation as much as I can.
I do not know what my instance intends to do about this, but personally I will block entirely any instance(s) controlled by Meta. I might also lock my account if necessary. This isn't about the people on there, this is very much about the practices of the corporation that controls it.
I sincerely hope their presence will not break the Fediverse :geodesic:
I hope we will stay strong and fight together for the better world we have started to create ✊:heart_cyber:
But I can’t help seeing the arrival of Goliath as a threat to the new world we have built...
This is the front page of the London Evening Standard today. It is very, very strange that the editor should think that an unreleased app from Meta which will almost certainly fail is the most important 'news' event for Londoners. Why?
i do not understand why a news site would not have an #RSS feed of their latest headlines.
you don't have to give your content away if you don't want to. but you cannot bitch & moan about #facebook or #twitter cannibalizing your readership in their fascist gated communities when you've turned your back on web standards and the open web.
In den ersten Stunden haben sich Millionen bei der Twitter-Alternative Threads angemeldet. In Deutschland ist sie nicht verfügbar, man kommt aber trotzdem rein.
FediPact advocates are again seeing the argument "they're scraping" dredged up and thrown into their faces.
No, they're not. Meta doesn't run a general web-wide crawler (like, say, a search engine would). Meta surveils the general web with the Facebook Pixel and other trackers installed directly on websites. No need to run a global crawler when the most of the world's existing websites willingly host your surveillance tech for you.
There's also no need to guess about the unknowable mysteries of cryptoid scrapers. That activity would appear in logs, and if persistent, incur performance penalties, especially on small-to-moderate sized instances.
Why would Meta bother manually scraping 14000 separate fedi instances while they're building an ActivityPub service that will "scrape" all of them at once through federation? Answer, they wouldn't.
Offered as raw material for your own tangles with Meta collaborators. However, keep in mind what will happen on this network if you start raising points of a technical nature. Ultimately, the scraping argument is a defeatist one, like saying "privacy is dead, so why bother protecting yourself?" Whether "they're scraping" or not, we won't throw up our hands and allow this space of refuge and community to be absorbed into surveillance capitalism without a fight. Scrape this Zuckerbros
Mastodon.social rolling out the red carpet for Threads is like an independent shop inviting a supermarket to set up next door.
But what’s done is done. And I’ve wasted enough words on this whole sorry affair over the last year.
So this is the last you’ll hear about it from me. When, eventually, you’re writing your “what went wrong?” articles, feel free to look up what I’d written on the issue back when.
⚠️ Hey #MastoAdmin FYI there is a Mastodon security update apparently coming 6 July.
EDIT: Interestingly, the same day #Facebook#Threads launches. Hmm... 🤔
The reason you probably didn't know about it, is because it was only announced* behind a proprietary centralized paywalled garden. (Not Twitter, but the same effect.)
Be ready.
This is not a recommended way to run an #OpenSource community.
(08.06.23) "Here is what Meta’s upcoming - fediverse platform, and - Twitter competitor looks like." (www.theverge.com)
The Verge article covering Meta's new platform coming to the fediverse.