this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
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That's it. It's just the fastest springboard this garbage company had to get yet another social media platform out the door when they sensed blood in the water.

Edit: This is a response to people who think FB users will somehow discover the fediverse and be converted by this action. They won't.

Or that FB has noble goals in choosing AP or will somehow be forced to be better. They won't.

It's just good software.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (1 children)

creates open protocol standard

Oh no! People are using it!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

people is fine. meta - no fucking way.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's not how open protocols work.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Well I mean xmpp and SMTP have been BASTARDIZED by corpos.... Sooooo yeah, no fuck meta

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 year ago

Truth.social did the same. It's essentially a standalone mastodon instance with hate built-in.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it's cool, the internet needs to go the way of decentralised stuff, no matter which way it goes about it. Just because a big company has gone and done it doesn't mean it's an ultimately bad thing to happen. At the very least, this is a gateway for people to understand other activitypub services.

"Mastadon is just like Threads but with no big company behind it or ads..." Kind of thing.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I think that many people worry about what Meta might be able to do wih all the data that they can access, and we don't know what they will do with it. We don't know what a Mastodon instance admin might do with the data either, but Meta has much more resources to use them.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And what stops meta from getting your data now?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Yeah if they wanted to scrape the fediverse it wouldn't be hard for them, and threads wouldn't even be necessary to do that

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For me, it's not so much about what they can do now, but what they will do in the future.

I'm not a very technical person (at least in this field). But I'm infinitely distrustful of anything Meta does and I consider it hubris if we think we're safe with the implementations we have now. They're talented and ruthless at what they do; making money out of you, whether you want to or not.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

They already have it and it's called browser fingerprinting.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Nono, as a mastodon user what i see there is mainly a concern bout they EEE'ing the fediverse

Oh you said many people, yeah i guess that's true too

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Meta can access your data on the fediverse without thread federating though, they can just make a scraper if they really wanted to, and it wouldn't be hard, literally an afternoons worth of code.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, just like big companies like Google use email protocols with Gmail. It's actually good for adoption. The alternative is that FB uses its own proprietary and competing protocol, making everything more fragmented.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

The alternative is that FB uses its own proprietary and competing protocol, making everything more fragmented.

Oh, so Bluesky

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

What it sounds like is that we need other big players so that one of them can't taint the protocol with proprietary extensions

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

The only "good" thing would be more contributors but I sure af dont' want to be federated with them.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Gotta respect the timing on that one. That was a capital P Pounce.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

So all these talks about possible federation with that trash heap were just false alarm? Well.... Good.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It seems like Threads isn't using Activity Pub at all

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you for saying this. The panic I've been seeing over this decision is unreal.

Meta are not engaged in some grand scheme to destroy the fediverse. Meta do not give two shits about the existence of the fediverse.

Meta wants to destroy Twitter. That's their only goal. Their only competition. They don't have a plan for killing the fediverse because they don't think it will ever be big enough to matter. And nothing about engaging with the fediverse gives them any leverage to do harm to it. There are so many whacked out theories about how this is some kind of attack but none of them even make any sense. "They'll start cutting off smaller instances." OK. So those smaller instances won't be connected to threads. Right now I'm pretty sure no instances are connected to threads. Last week they certainly weren't. And those smaller instances were doing just fine. We're not talking about taking away oxygen. It's just refusing something that nobody wants anyway.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You can't prove any of your assertions. It's all supposition. Meanwhile, history has many examples of corporations doing exactly what people are fearing. Like what Google did to XMPP, and Microsoft did to Kerberos. It's wise to be wary.

There's even a Wikipedia article on the tactic Microsoft uses: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

You're taking a realistic possibility and poo-pooing it when you don't know anything about the history of corporations destroying open source standards.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's precisely because I do understand the history that I'm "poo-pooing" the mass hysteria that's going around here.

Everyone keeps citing examples like email and XMPP without actually stopping to think about whether they are actually comparable to what's happening with Meta and the fediverse. Because they're really not

You're more than welcome to explain to me how Facebook's dastardly plan to destroy Mastodon actually works, but I sincerely hope it's more than just "Oh, like what happened with XMPP," because it's not. These are different situations, plain and simple.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You make fair points but it's a bit much to call this reaction mass hysteria. I think people are just trying to figure out where we all stand if/when Meta does start interfering with the fediverse.

We don't need to have a full understanding of how their dastardly plan works in order to be apprehensive about the possibility.

I agree with you that the threat seems limited for now, but its also wise to be extremely wary and cautious when dealing with an entity such as Meta.

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