How do we feel about Meta joining the Fediverse?
How do we feel about Meta joining the Fediverse?
Personally, I want nothing to do with them and I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I moved to the Fediverse to get away from all these corpos.
They are free to set up an instance. Not sure who would federate with them.
They see the fediverse trend gain9ng steam with the rise of Mastodon and go "Oh sheit we need to be on that for $$$". Proceed to embrace, extend, enshittify, and extinguish. Its nothing but Zuckerberg's gasping breaths to try and stay relevant as his company begins the very slow, but inevitable, backslide into technological irrelevance.
I will be leaving and/or blocking any instance that chooses to federate with anything related to Meta. They are antithetical to the entire foundation of the metaverse and they ruin everything they touch.
Judging from their past and all the bad actions they have done in the past, bad for democracy, privacy, minorities and marginalised people and how openly they have a far/extreme-right bias. Well I feel extremely negative about them joining in. They were also part of destruction of another open/federated protocol in the past: they played big part in destroying XMPP/Jabber messaging. So I am afraid they will do their usual embrace, extend, and extinguish thing and their surveillance capitalist thing and yeah. no good. Best to block their instances outright.
Is that necessary though? I feel like we should let them join. If they do something malicious, then we can block them. IMO, it doesn't make sense to just preemptively block them for no real reason.
Screw meta.
I think we should let them consume Fediverse content but not create it.
If Meta proposes to let Instagram users follow people on Mastodon or whatever, that seems like a reasonable compromise - they get to keep people on their feeds viewing ads and we get more reach - but they shouldn't have the power to leave and take a large % of Fediverse content with them; if you want to make a post, you need to do so from a non-Meta-controlled instance in a non-Meta-controlled app.
I hate the fact that for a large number of people, this will be how they will be introduced to the fediverse and their view of it will be tainted by Meta. I also dread seeing Meta spam in my federated timeline. And I also fear Meta building its own proprietary features on top of the ActivityPub protocol, making the content generated with them incompatible with independent clients, and allowing Zuck to spread his monopoly to the fediverse as well.