I’m just curious what you folks think. The whole idea of the Fediverse seems to go against everything Meta has stops for with their existing platforms (Facebook and Instagram).
What are they after? Are they going to try and infiltrate it so they can get people’s data and content? Are they trying to monetize it? It just doesn’t add up. I feel like most people on the Fediverse already would agree that we don’t want Meta’s platforms to access our content.
Please excuse my ignorance if it doesn’t work like I think it does. I’m relatively new to the Fediverse myself.
I think new laws in Europe have something to do with it. EU is trying to force the big platforms to interoperate. Facebook/Meta is of course one of the most targeted. So I think their thought is by signing on to the existing fediverse, they can say hey we are playing nice no need to regulate us further
Meta has been hit hard by a series of failures over the last decade.
Continually missing first place, the company has broadly pivoted towards more open partnership in order to boost their offerings.
For example, their LLM weights being released to researchers when the product was clearly behind OpenAI and even Google.
Playing nice with federated networks fits into this.
Meta is betting that open platforms do well enough to corner a non-insignificant part of the market and are hoping to leverage compatibility with it in order to protect and differentiate their fledgling product from competition.
None of this means they aren’t still going to try to siphon every detail they can to maximize ad revenue for users.
But they aren’t trying to kill or sabotage the fediverse (which they rightfully don’t seriously see as competition in itself). They are hoping it is successful enough that it helps give them an edge against walled garden networks backed by competitors’ money.
In general, expect to see more openness from Meta in the coming years for much of what they do. They finally realized they aren’t Apple and can’t get away with siloing their products within the market.
I can agree with all you are saying, while also agreeing with the stance that Meta’s presence is corrosive by its’ very nature.
There will be a sugar rush up front, diabetes down the road.
EDIT: They WILL find a way to insert themselves more severely if and when this thing grows.
There a post suggesting that it’s a EU law they are trying to avoid. It states that if a platform is large and a gatekeeper for information, then certain laws will apply. But by being in the fediverse that information is accessible by not-meta platforms, so the laws won’t apply (they will argue).
I am personally guessing it’s this option, people keep saying the idea is to EEE but I don’t think this would be the most effective use of Meta resources since they should be focusing yheir efforts at beating twitter.
Jajaja I thought about that while typing it out but I still dont believe this is about EEE, Meta hasnt operated with that mindset yet in other spaces from what I know and I feel this is more that a kneejerk reaction of people not liking big corporations associating it with the idea that big corps want to kill the freedom that these spaces bring to online communities.
But I believe in the design of the fediverse and the resilience of the people, I dont think that a few platforms hoarding the big majority threaten the entirety of the fediverse, as long as people can self host their own instances since we can ensure there will always be spaces for communities like this, even in worse case scenarios like Meta just having so many features that other platforms cant compete in those terms I still feel a niche of the same people that are building this today are going to stick with it, and thus we can keep this going even if we are forced to defederate at a later date or they defederate us.
I’ve been trying to figure this out myself. The best I can come up with is that Meta wants to increase their user base as fast as possible and this is one way of doing it.
Another thought I had is that they could be thinking of getting Twitter to add ActivityPub, and then federating with Twitter. Meta could then claim all users can use their platform.
The only reasonable explanation is to destroy it and eliminate future competition. Zuckerberg himself said it’s better to buy a company than compete with it. He can’t buy the Fediverse because it’s FOSS and community driven, but it’s vulnerable to “embrace, extent, extinguish”. There’s nothing built in to keep that from happening.
There are lots of potential reason that vary from terrible to neutral. I can’t imagine what’s going on in Zuck’s brain, thankfully, so I don’t know if this is terrifying, or just a way to follow my racist aunt on Mastodon. Either way I don’t exactly trust Facebook though, so I’d rather err on the side of caution and just defederate for now and see how it turns out.
I think it’s all about moderation and content management.
Before Musk, the greatest challenge facing Twitter was content moderation. There’s all this legal but annoying content you do not want to host, but if you block people from your platform you’re suddenly limiting free speech and there’s an outrage and suddenly you’re in even deeper shit.
The fediverse solves this very elegantly - throwing you off my platform is not the same as cutting you off from the public sphere the platform is part of. So Meta can be stricter in their content management than Twitter was, and possibly avoid the free speech critiques that Twitter faced.
It’s already kind of visible in how the Threads developers are emphasising how they’re trying to make Threads a “friendlier” space than Twitter.
I know it, you know it, the original Twitter team knows it, and Meta knows it too.
Over time I think this will become increasingly clear to everyone, and as a new social network pops up every couple of months and social media becomes more fragmented, it will only become more important that people are able to communicate with each other across networks. Even the average normie out there who hasn’t joined the Fediverse yet because they think it’s “too complicated” or “don’t want to join something with servers”, is starting to look at services like BlueSky, Threads and Tumblr (which have all made some level of commitment to federation) and slowly beginning to understand the value of being able to follow people on completely different networks. And the more social networks that exist, the more valuable federation becomes.
I guess what I’m getting at is that Meta and BlueSky know that social media fragmentation and federation are not only on the horizon, but here today. Meta, Twitter and TikTok would be perfectly happy to have things continue as is, with them being the center of the centralized social media universe. But the biggest collective fear of every big tech company is sleeping on paradigm shifts caused by new, disruptive technology (like ActivityPub), and thus being dethroned by some new players.
I’d argue that the fact that Meta, one of the biggest and most powerful tech companies in the world, is now planning on adopting ActivityPub is a sign that the Fediverse is winning.
It’s kind of like the old days when we had AOL amd MSN, and initially the people didn’t realize that they were in containers and then they got a browser and the whole internet was sitting out there.
They don’t have to own the fediverse, they can just charge for access to it. People who are happy with a superficial view, will pay with their data to have a window.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
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I think it’s some sort of insurance or backup plan in case their platforms eventually die out.
I think new laws in Europe have something to do with it. EU is trying to force the big platforms to interoperate. Facebook/Meta is of course one of the most targeted. So I think their thought is by signing on to the existing fediverse, they can say hey we are playing nice no need to regulate us further
Hadn’t even considered this, but I think you’re onto something. Even if it’s not the main goal, that could definitely have factored into the decision.
Disagree with a lot of the stances here.
Meta has been hit hard by a series of failures over the last decade.
Continually missing first place, the company has broadly pivoted towards more open partnership in order to boost their offerings.
For example, their LLM weights being released to researchers when the product was clearly behind OpenAI and even Google.
Playing nice with federated networks fits into this.
Meta is betting that open platforms do well enough to corner a non-insignificant part of the market and are hoping to leverage compatibility with it in order to protect and differentiate their fledgling product from competition.
None of this means they aren’t still going to try to siphon every detail they can to maximize ad revenue for users.
But they aren’t trying to kill or sabotage the fediverse (which they rightfully don’t seriously see as competition in itself). They are hoping it is successful enough that it helps give them an edge against walled garden networks backed by competitors’ money.
In general, expect to see more openness from Meta in the coming years for much of what they do. They finally realized they aren’t Apple and can’t get away with siloing their products within the market.
I can agree with all you are saying, while also agreeing with the stance that Meta’s presence is corrosive by its’ very nature.
There will be a sugar rush up front, diabetes down the road.
EDIT: They WILL find a way to insert themselves more severely if and when this thing grows.
There a post suggesting that it’s a EU law they are trying to avoid. It states that if a platform is large and a gatekeeper for information, then certain laws will apply. But by being in the fediverse that information is accessible by not-meta platforms, so the laws won’t apply (they will argue).
I am personally guessing it’s this option, people keep saying the idea is to EEE but I don’t think this would be the most effective use of Meta resources since they should be focusing yheir efforts at beating twitter.
What’s EEE?
Embrace, extend and extinguish.
It was a more common tactic back in the day for tech giants to destroy competition omfor open software specifically.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish
2 birds, 1 stone…
Jajaja I thought about that while typing it out but I still dont believe this is about EEE, Meta hasnt operated with that mindset yet in other spaces from what I know and I feel this is more that a kneejerk reaction of people not liking big corporations associating it with the idea that big corps want to kill the freedom that these spaces bring to online communities.
But I believe in the design of the fediverse and the resilience of the people, I dont think that a few platforms hoarding the big majority threaten the entirety of the fediverse, as long as people can self host their own instances since we can ensure there will always be spaces for communities like this, even in worse case scenarios like Meta just having so many features that other platforms cant compete in those terms I still feel a niche of the same people that are building this today are going to stick with it, and thus we can keep this going even if we are forced to defederate at a later date or they defederate us.
Lower infrastructure and maintenance costs. It fits the current scene of all tech companies suddenly getting paranoid and chasing immediate profits.
I’ve been trying to figure this out myself. The best I can come up with is that Meta wants to increase their user base as fast as possible and this is one way of doing it.
Another thought I had is that they could be thinking of getting Twitter to add ActivityPub, and then federating with Twitter. Meta could then claim all users can use their platform.
The only reasonable explanation is to destroy it and eliminate future competition. Zuckerberg himself said it’s better to buy a company than compete with it. He can’t buy the Fediverse because it’s FOSS and community driven, but it’s vulnerable to “embrace, extent, extinguish”. There’s nothing built in to keep that from happening.
I think Zuck looked at the hosting bills and thought: “How do I get the suckers to host their own data while allowing me to control and harvest it?”
Microsoft pioneered (or maybe popularized, not sure) embrace, extend, extinguish. I’m sure this is a version of that.
The same thing cancer always does: To spread and ruin.
*metastasize
Zing!
There are lots of potential reason that vary from terrible to neutral. I can’t imagine what’s going on in Zuck’s brain, thankfully, so I don’t know if this is terrifying, or just a way to follow my racist aunt on Mastodon. Either way I don’t exactly trust Facebook though, so I’d rather err on the side of caution and just defederate for now and see how it turns out.
Free data.
I think it’s all about moderation and content management.
Before Musk, the greatest challenge facing Twitter was content moderation. There’s all this legal but annoying content you do not want to host, but if you block people from your platform you’re suddenly limiting free speech and there’s an outrage and suddenly you’re in even deeper shit.
The fediverse solves this very elegantly - throwing you off my platform is not the same as cutting you off from the public sphere the platform is part of. So Meta can be stricter in their content management than Twitter was, and possibly avoid the free speech critiques that Twitter faced.
It’s already kind of visible in how the Threads developers are emphasising how they’re trying to make Threads a “friendlier” space than Twitter.
Federation is the future of social media.
I know it, you know it, the original Twitter team knows it, and Meta knows it too.
Over time I think this will become increasingly clear to everyone, and as a new social network pops up every couple of months and social media becomes more fragmented, it will only become more important that people are able to communicate with each other across networks. Even the average normie out there who hasn’t joined the Fediverse yet because they think it’s “too complicated” or “don’t want to join something with servers”, is starting to look at services like BlueSky, Threads and Tumblr (which have all made some level of commitment to federation) and slowly beginning to understand the value of being able to follow people on completely different networks. And the more social networks that exist, the more valuable federation becomes.
I guess what I’m getting at is that Meta and BlueSky know that social media fragmentation and federation are not only on the horizon, but here today. Meta, Twitter and TikTok would be perfectly happy to have things continue as is, with them being the center of the centralized social media universe. But the biggest collective fear of every big tech company is sleeping on paradigm shifts caused by new, disruptive technology (like ActivityPub), and thus being dethroned by some new players.
I’d argue that the fact that Meta, one of the biggest and most powerful tech companies in the world, is now planning on adopting ActivityPub is a sign that the Fediverse is winning.
It’s kind of like the old days when we had AOL amd MSN, and initially the people didn’t realize that they were in containers and then they got a browser and the whole internet was sitting out there.
They don’t have to own the fediverse, they can just charge for access to it. People who are happy with a superficial view, will pay with their data to have a window.