Personally, I want nothing to do with them and I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I moved to the Fediverse to get away from all these corpos.
Personally, I want nothing to do with them and I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I moved to the Fediverse to get away from all these corpos.
I don’t believe at all that I have any privacy on the internet. As someone in the US, I pretty much assumed I lost that when Bush signed the Patriot Act. My dislike of Meta joining has nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with their love of destroying good things for the sake of profit. I have no desire for yet another thing to become a corporate bullshit farm. This is honestly my last resort. If the fediverse is dismantled for profit, I’ll just stop any type of social media whatsoever. It’s not worth it to me.
I’m trying to think about how they could ruin the fediverse but can’t think of anything. If they contribute to the code, it must be open source. So it’s either shit and isn’t included/no one adopts their changes or it’s actually good and makes a better service.
I agree with you on the privacy front - if they want to gobble up data, they can do that now without their own instance. If LLMs want to scrape the fediverse for data there’s no stopping them either.
There’s plenty of “I want nothing to do with them” here in the post but I’m not really understanding the risk. This isn’t an approval of Meta as a company - I just want to understand what people believe the risk is.
Between here and the debates on mastodon/Calckey it seems there’s a lot of fear their data will be scraped without understanding that Meta (or any corp) can do that without setting up an instance. The other is not wanting all that meta crap in their feeds… but that’s solely up to the people they follow. Lastly is the EEE, but ActivityPub is an open protocol so there’s no stopping them from using it any more than stopping them from using http. And preemptive blocking by some instances will do nothing to stop them from using it either.
Every corporation that’s joined the fediverse in the last seven years has been prophecized to be the end of the fediverse, and we’re still here. Right now everyone is rallying around an idea, when there’s literally nothing to do about it yet since there is no meta instance yet. The only thing we can do is continue improving this place and making it be a place people want to join. Not create nonbinding covenants and pacts against a company’s future actions.
To be clear, I’m not saying we should embrace them with open arms, but defederating bad actors takes two clicks. Admins should be wary and make informed judgements about this the same way they do for every new instance that joins.
This is all so well put. Much better than I was able to communicate.
ActivityPub feels like plumbing to me in the way that TCP/IP feel like plumbing. Meta, Google, etc all use the same plumbing - so what?