Remember Cambridge Analytica!

Meta is NOT anyone's friend.

If it doesn't enhance shareholder value they won't be interested in what you have to say.

🤨🤷‍♂️

more like they are at the Katzentisch

(literally a "cats table", but means a small table for children to sit at (where they can be fed and watched over, but can't bother what the adults are doing) at a larger gathering..

de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katzenti…

Redewendung

^{Autoren der Wikimedia-Projekte (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

There is a world of difference between them implementing a protocol and the community that already uses that protocol welcoming them with a red carpet.

If you don‘t see a problem, you haven’t been paying attention. Look at what happened to the web. XMPP. Email. Look up embrace, extend, extinguish.

None of what we‘re worried about is conjecture. It is based on past experience with the enclosure of the commons by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, startups, and public corporations.

@Bossito I keep seeing people repeating the "embrace, extend, extinguish" line, but I don't see how that applies here.

They can't do anything to existing fediverse communities. They can't put ads in our feeds. Their users, if disruptive, can be blocked easily, either by other users or instance admins.

I don't use Facebook and I can't stand Meta, but I don't understand how they can inflict damage on our communities. What am I missing?

@martincrownover I think what you're missing is the *future user* that they're hoping this might pull into their ecosystem instead of some other Fedi service, and the proprietary features or incentives ("extend") that Facebook could use to pull those users into their part of the Fediverse, while potentially punishing those in other parts of the Fediverse (e.g. by marking them as spam if they don't jump through hoops).

1/2

Facebook touted XMPP support as a way to get people to use FB Messenger, you could talk to anyone using an XMPP-compatible service, not just FB users. Sound familiar?

After a while, once enough people started using their service because they didn't have to worry about being cut off from their off-FB friends, they pulled full XMPP support in 2015, so FB users could only talk to other FB users.

They pulled users away from open XMPP services, and then cut them off.

@eishiya I'm not super familiar with the history of XMPP.

I guess the harm could come from them luring people away from existing fediverse platforms, but that could happen with *anyone* developing *any* kind of ActivityPub platform, right? Or even a Non-Activitypub platform?

@eishiya And couldn't any Mastodon instance owner modify the code to do the same thing? Why is that different than of Meta does it?

And on top of all that, being part of ActivityPub makes it easy for users of custom services to uproot and go to a different platform, right?

@martincrownover ActivityPub does not support anything like a nomadic identity, no. Any given account is tied to its server, and moving creates a new identity.

Individual services can implement tools to ease migrations (e.g. Mastodon has its automatic re-follow requests), but there's nothing built into AP. Mastodon has CSV imports/exports of things like mutes and follows and other services have other features to make migrating less tedious, but that doesn't mean Facebook has to provide that.

@eishiya What is stopping them - or anyone - from just scraping all the data with a crawler?

Am I wrong to assume that anything put online, especially in a social media setting, should be considered public and put of your control anyway?

There's a price difference :]

Edit: There's also a difference in the way the data is connected. Without the ability to directly interact with those users, the social graph is broken, which is less useful to FB. Random posts aren't useful to FB, what it needs are posts that tell it things about its users.

@eishiya Sure, I get that. And I'm not saying people shouldn't lock their doors. That's kinda the whole point of this anyway, that we can do that so easily.

The drama surrounding all this just seems a little much, I guess. Meta can't stop all this from being fun and cool. 🙂

*nodds in agreement*

#NSAbook will do what all #GAFAMs do:

#EmbraceExtendAndExtinguish!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%…

@Marty

Well, Linux is open source but Microsoft tried (not sure if with success) to register parts of it...

Mastodon is open source, but his main developer restricted the use of the brand...

Facebook won't profit if they don't find ways to make money and restrict freedom...

Lawyers are great at finding ways to do that... and they can afford many, which happen in the case of most Fediverse devs, which means that someone might try to use their volunteer work, profit from it and restrict is use.

Even if they don't succeed at doing that, it'll be a pain in the ass for those who have contributed thousands of hours to the development of the Fediverse without having received a cent for their work.

@bossito 🇪🇺📺🎶 @Aral Balkan

Reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode:

Serving Man

@vncntx At the beginning, nothing. Once #Meta/Facebook/Instagram’s #Project92 is the largest instance, they’ll start making “improvements” to the protocol. Other instances will have to implement them to federate. At that point, they’ll be running the show.

(If we let them. And by “we”, I mean the largest instances. mastodon.social and the other largest instances could nip this in the bud now if they wanted to. But I hear they’re out signing NDAs…)

#embrace #extend #extinguish

@vncntx Because unless you learn from history, you’re doomed to repeat it.

(Which, clearly, it seems we are.)

🤷‍♂️

exactly this. for those of us that have seen this sort of thing happen many times before, (by many companies, not just facebook, but facebook have also historically been a culprit) we're right to be cautious.

Meta sympathisers: Fast forward two or three years and prove us otherwise

@paul @vncntx (Meanwhile, the Small Web will be up and running by then so hopefully some of us at least won’t have to know or care about their bullshit.)

🤞

@alx Will do :) 💕

@paul @vncntx