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@Bossito@mastodon.green 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.
@aral @Bossito I mean, the attack vector is protocol/client development - even if they are open source contributions by a big org, the speed of changes can be too much for individual contributors to follow on the side, so the source and development process is effectively controlled only by the big org at some point
@aral @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. They can't control the protocol. 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
@martincrownover 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 I don't see how their potentiality extending the platform for their own users could harm everyone outside of that either, though. Aside from just having users who aren't part of the "normal" fediverse, and potentially walling them off at some point (which, again, could happen to *any* ActivityPub platform/instance) I don't see how it makes my experience, as it is now, worse.
@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.
@martincrownover You're right that it can happen with any platform or any instance. The difference is that Meta is huge enough that it doing so would affect *many* more users, and that it has a long history of misusing its users data - any additional tool it has to pull more people and more users' data (including off-site users' data, via AP!) is almost certainly going to translate to social or even personal harm.
@martincrownover That last point is why many admins have pledged to defederate from Meta on sight - Meta is a known bad actor when it comes to data, and they do not want to willingly serve more data up to them. Another reason is they're unwilling to play into Meta's inevitable marketing of "join us, you'll be able to talk to all the other places anyway".
@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?
@martincrownover 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.
@martincrownover To use an analogy for this whole situation with Meta: anyone can turn out to be a killer and it takes a certain amount of trust that people *aren't* killers to function in society, but if I see Jeffrey Dahmer walking down the hall, I'm going to lock my door.
@martincrownover @aral @Bossito
My guess is network value scales with the number of users.
And Mastodon does not have easy account migration. (Fix?)
The value proposition to users would be having corporate backing that allows for investment in an online presence.
The value proposition for Meta is likely to be that, with enough users, defederation becomes markedly less effective and value extraction schemes similar to Facebook/Twitter/Reddit can ensue.
So imagine scenario. Meta does join in. It's instance on day one is bigger then entire fediverse combined. Their server implementation by extension too. This means unlike now where all other implementations are following mastodon trying to keep up and mastodon being the current king, its now meta being the biggest player. They dont need you to federate with them. Most probably they arent interested and would prefer if you dont (My guess is they are trying to figure a way out how to show there is interoperability so they cant be sued for monopolistic actions or something). So meta does not have much interest to follow you, but you (as in instance, user, current fedi) would like to be able to reachout to those millions of people on the other side. So actually you want to federate with them.
And so, its not anymore mastodon the king but Meta. Sure they dont need to start with big things breaking the federation or doing evil shit like like putting ads (no worries this takes time and they have enough money to burn). It could be fun innocent features art first that people want to have (dont know eg. reply with gif or some filters, anything). Devs in order to provide similar features will try to implement on their projects to stay compatible. Thats how you gain upper hand. Then when you push more evil feature, people will star justifying it to not loose the connection to large userbase they created bond with. This will go on, slowly piece by piece until either you implement some crazy federation breaking stuff from meta or stay outside of the network. This can easily lead to more instances/people staying on meta's side then before meta joining. This will create a lot of discussions, forks, fights result of which will be that we will need to basically start over. I think there isn't much to gain from this and a lot to loose.
Lets keep the mainstream big tech platforms where they are. In the other universe.
@muppeth @aral @martincrownover @Bossito
tl;dr: No one has ever said "Oh, good, Meta's involved," when they've seen Mark Zuckerberg walk into the room.
ArmUkraine@muppeth @aral @martincrownover @Bossito Good points made here. Zuckerberg’s plan may simply be to join and last long enough for meta/mastodon instance personal relationships and reconnections to happen so when they are inevitably defederated (or cut themselves off), mastodonians will flock back to meta/failbook and their walled version to be abused by lord Zuck again
To clarify, I believe whatever he's up to, it will ultimately fail and probably backfire.
@muppeth @aral @martincrownover @Bossito In any case, we could not prevent a mega-corporation from installing its own node, given the open nature of the protocol.
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.