The exchange is about Meta’s upcoming ActivityPub-enabled network Threads. Meta is calling for a meeting, his response is priceless!
A 45 minute “round table” with multiple rando masto instance admins? That doesn’t sound like enough time for the table to get very round.
It sounds more like 5 minutes introduction, 30 minute presentation by Meta, 10 minutes Q&A. But oops our presentation ran just a bit long, and I really do have a hard stop at noon so we really only have about 5 minutes for questions thanks for all of the valuable feedback we’ll be sure to circle back offline.
Ah, I see you’ve taken part in Bullshit Corporate Meetings™ before!
“We here at Meta take people’s privacy very seriously and are committed to protecting our users. Unfortunately at this time we can’t discuss what measures we’ve put in place.”
If Meta wants to make an app that is competitive with other fediverse apps and is actually good, I don’t see the problem. If they want to harm other fediverse instances then I do. How much harm could they do to the fediverse? Would they then block off all other apps when their app is the biggest essentially?
“If Meta wants…” My concern is that the only conceivable motivation Meta could have for investing money in such a project is making more money. If, in the process, Meta destroys the eco-structure of the Fediverse, so much the better—less competition, more money for them.
That’s exactly it and there’s no reason to pretend otherwise. Meta is a financial instrument to turn money into more money. The only reason Meta would engage with any third party is to make their commercial products more attractive to advertisers. Play with Meta and before you know if they’ll be writing all the rules about how you’re allowed to run your instance.
they could make their own custom version of the fediverse, slowly diverging from the core open source version, then push the actual fediverse into obscurity, the same way Google Chat killed XMPP. Imagine a new Meta-controlled “fediverse” where you can only have an instance if you use their code and their rules.
I found this article interesting and relevant: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
this was an excellent article. I’m old enough to remember being impacted by these events.
I’m not in Munich, but I remember trying to embrace OpenOffice, and telling my wife how pissed off I was that Microsoft wasn’t following it’s own open source document standard.
I remember Google killing XMPP, and there’s also the more recent examples of what Facebook has done to WhatApp, Instagram, and the other potential competitors that got buried.
