So, recently some fediverse admins (mostly Mastodon) and the founder of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko (Gargron), where contacted by Meta/Facebook for an NDA meeting. We know nothing about it, but we’re pretty sure that it was about this project92 thing that Meta/Facebook is creating to “compete” with Twitter.
So a lot of Mastodon admins already singed a pact to immediately block any Meta/Facebook activity in the fediverse as soon as it comes up. My Mastodon instance, fosstodon.org hasn’t singed that pact and I’m pretty worried.
The following image is an screenshot of Gargron and dansup (creator of Pixelfed) talking about this. These posts were deleted, even from the wayback machine.
I would hate that enough to switch instances over it, I think. That meeting could be over anything from being about tracking users across sites, to an offer to pay the admins to stay federated with some Facebook ActivityPub project, to asking the admins to add sponsored posts or comments, to a request for free advice from the admins about the fediverse, to trying to recruit the admins to go work on some other Facebook project. I don’t know. But I can’t imagine this ever being a good thing, when it comes to that company - I don’t touch anything they run. And putting an NDA on just an initial meeting is sketchy as heck - even unenforceable NDA’s are used to threaten people all the time (see: Weinstein, etc).
I’m on mastodon.social, and considering where to move now
So am I. I don’t want to be a part of any instance that federates with Meta. Do you know where I can find a list of pact members?
Here, by the Pixelfed maintainer