What's Meta up to?

What’s Meta up to?

  1. Embrace ActivityPub, , Mastodon, and the fediverse

  2. Extend ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse with a very-usable app that provides additional functionality (initially the ability to follow everybody you’re following on Instagram, and to communicate with all Threads users) that isn’t available to the rest of the fediverse – as well over time providing additional services and introducing incompatibilities and non-standard improvements to the protocol

  3. Exploit ActivityPub, Mastodon, and the fediverse by utilizing them for profit – and also using them selfishly for Meta’s own ends

Since the fediverse is so much smaller than Threads, the most obvious ways of exploiting it – such as stealing market share by getting people currently in the fediverse to move to Threads – aren’t going to work. But exploitation is one of Meta’s core competences, and once you start to look at it with that lens, it’s easy to see some of the ways even their initial announcement and tiny first steps are exploiting the fediverse: making Threads feel like a more compelling platform, and reshaping regulation. Longer term, it’s a great opportunity for Meta to explore – and maybe invest in – shifting their business model to decentralized surveillance capitalism.

  • breakfastmtn@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    Ugh, at least they mention regulation and acknowledge XMPP still exists but this is one of the worst of these panicked scare pieces I’ve read yet. It’s filled with bad faith interpretation of quotes, poor analysis, and baseless speculation. The motto of all of these articles seems to be “if I can dream up a way to be scared of it, it must be true!”

    How do you dismissively call Evan Podromou a “fediverse influencer”?! He’s one of the fucking co-authors of ActivityPub.

    Their treatment of these two Mosseri quotes is just bad faith, fever swamp nonsense:

    “I think we might be a more compelling platform for creators, particularly for the newer creators who are more and more savvy, if we are a place where you don’t have to feel like you have to trust us forever.”

    “Eventually, it should also be possible to enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app/server.”

    They conclude that their (obvious!) goal is to be completely untrustworthy while giving people the false belief that they’re trustworthy. And the evidence? It’s all in the quote! He used the word “feel” and that can only mean a covert declaration of opposite day.

    Same with the second quote. It’s “already clear that people won’t be able to move all their followers to other fediverse servers.” Why? It’s implied that the use of the word “eventually” means never (it doesn’t. look it up.). Does it matter that the quote is from a post talking about their gradual implementation of ActivityPub? Does it matter that moving accounts would logically occur near the end of that timeline? Of course not! We’re playing a game where we take a quote and manipulate it until it gives us whatever meaning we want. The other piece of evidence is that they haven’t decided whether federation will be opt-in or opt-out, which has nothing to do with moving your account. Make no mistake though, it is CLEAR that those quotes mean the opposite of what they say.

    This is what the first quote means: ‘we can build legitimate trust by not locking people into our platform.’ Does that mean they won’t lock people in? No. But that quote isn’t evidence they won’t. Pretending that it is is tinfoil-hat bullshit.

    Put the current fediverse to the side, and imagine a future of decentralized surveillance capitalism, where “Meta’s fediverse” filled with instances run by brands, politicians, celebrities, influencers, and non-profits – all doing harvesting data on Meta’s behalf

    What a fucking nightmare that would be. Herd a bunch of crazy cats you don’t control for a rat’s nest of data without a simple way to use it to target ad deliveries (which is how they ultimately make money). Trusting someone like Alex Jones with the core of their business model? Riiiiight. And if they did it? So what? It would have no impact on Mastodon or the larger Fediverse. Even if Ron DeSantis had his own Meta-sponsored instance, everyone could just block it. I also fail to see how being in a direct business relationship with those people severs their connection. It’s a much stronger connection than them just having an account on their platform. And it just reintroduces the moderation problem this is claimed to solve. Public pressure would just shift from “ban user” to “block instance,” losing them the data and revenue anyway.