masterspace @ masterspace @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

My guess would be that

a) building their next social network on an open platform will let antitrust regulators off their back

and/or b) a Twitter clone sounds less sexy then a web3 / decentralized fediverse play. Meta has chased every other bandwagon (metaverse, ai, etc), it's entirely possible this is just them always chasing the hot new thing so that they don't miss out. They certainly aren't going to let themselves be Blackberry and refuse to change, they'd rather desperately copy every hot new thing and change quickly to always have an offering that appeals to their customers good enough

And it would only be a protocol extension when it would be returned upstream, which I highly doubt that Facebook’s parent company Meta would do that.

Oh yeah, Meta definitely never contributes anything back to the open source community, I type into a React frontend, that uses a GraphQl communication protocol to an API built using node, watchman, and a variety of other meta made or sponsored projects.

/S

https://github.com/orgs/facebook/repositories?type=all

There are over 2B Instagram accounts actually and over 115M in the US alone, so yeah, they definitely didn't just starting counting them all.

You know what's irrelevant to the current conversation about how they have so many users they don't need us?

How many fediverse accounts are there total? A couple hundred thousand? And how many of those are duplicates across instances?

Whether or not all those users stick is irrelevant, the user counts for lemmy / kbin also won't have all of them stick. The point is that they do not need us or our content. They can hit a bill without even supporting activitypub.

No, this feels like a massive corporation with massive marketing and market research departments succinctly breaking down a concept that most on the fediverse nerd out too much to do.

Do you know what happens to protocols over time? They get extended with user facing features or they stop being used and die.

Once again, Meta got 100M users in a week, they do not need to support the fediverse. Stop acting like this is some calculation and not just them building the same basic features they have in their other platforms that users expect into their new one.

It's more like locking your door and barring it up really good and making it inconvenient for you to get in or out and makes your place less appealing to others, and at the same time you've got several wide open doors behind you.

Federating from threads accomplishes nothing. It's just echo chamber hysteria. Threads isn't even organized around communities, it's organized around people, by default no Threads users would be in Lemmy communities and we wouldn't see any of their content.

Lmao at you complaining about toxicity when you're toxically judging and gatekeeping 2 Billion people.

I'm pretty sure it's just to cut costs / complexity / part counts in lower end phones, and higher end phones will use an always on display.

Though worth noting that the Nothing Phone 1 & 2 include pretty snazzy LEDs on the back that are used for notifications amongst other things.

Now, there are single sign-on (SSO) possibilities, but for them to be universally accessible across the Fediverse, you either need to impose them on 20,000 admins across two dozen software implementations, or you need them all to a) agree to support SSO, and b) agree to support the same SSO options.

Yeah, this is the real crux of the issue and is a large unsolved problem. We simply have no standardized system for decentralized identity verification.

SSO works as a way of maintaining identity across the fediverse, but that's not really federating identity so much as it's getting all instance to offload identity verification to various central services.

I believe I heard Microsoft had a research project in the area of decentralized identity verification but I don't know if it went anywhere or how suitable it would be.

I think what they mean is identity that is coupled to them the person and not whichever instance they choose to sign in on.

I mean, if they actually subscribe to threads and discussions across instances, and isn't that kind of the point of a social network? For users to use it? Also odd that half the arguments against it are that it will kill the fediverse and half of the arguments are that it will provide too many users to the fediverse.

How will not federating with them prevent that?

Facebook is not evil, advertising is.

The people at Facebook aren't sitting there plotting to make the world worse, they're just sitting there figuring out how to make the numbers go up and since they're an advertising driven business, that means engagement metrics, which leads to the vast majority of their resultant evil. The advertising / engagement driven business model is what is actually evil and what could actually be addressed by legislators.

1. The regulatory angle makes the most sense given the scrutiny they're under from regulators, courts, the FTC consent orders, etc. Also entirely possible that the product manager building the project was able to pitch the fediverse because it was the hot trendy thing (NFTs, metaverse, ai, web 3, decentral etc.)
2. Given their history of buying WhatsApp and Instagram? Those aren't examples of EEE those are examples of anti-competitive corporate buyouts that should be illegal but aren't. Facebook does not have a history of EEE, and continue to be a large open source contributor, maintaining multiple open source libraries, frameworks, and protocols.
3. Because you can just block their instance.
4. They're scraping and selling your data regardless, this doesn't change anything.
5. Sounds like a lot more potential moderators.
6. I dunno probably the same way that half of Reddit posts are Twitter links. It will be fine. You can stay talking to your nerdy friends in the nerdy communities.
7. Threads came out of New Product Experimentation (NPE), Meta's (now defunct) experimentation division that produced tons of different experimental apps to see what would stick, or in this case, to have a card to play if a rival social media network were to suddenly implode for some reason. Was it developed in good faith in regards to Twitter or creating a healthy competitive business landscape? No. Was it developed in good faith in regards to the fediverse? Yeah, they're not gunning after the dozens of Mastodon users.
8. Until someone can actually state how federation with Meta would harm the fediverse, I'm for it. That EEE blog post that everyone keeps circulating does not do that. Its a quite frankly dumb take from someone who loved a protocol so much they didn't realize that users didn't. XMPP never had that many users, Google Talk did. The lesson to learn from that story is not that Google killed XMPP it's that a protocol's openness does not matter compared to user experience. It's awesome if you can have both, but if push comes to shove, and the protocol can't keep up, then the better UX will always win out, even if it's closed.
9. No, I wouldn't add them or interact with them.
10. I trust that they will do what they say want to do, which is to try and get a lot of users and make money advertising to them.

Now, I've answered 10 of your questions and I'm still waiting to hear what the problem with federating with them is that's not just someone blindly regurgitating that same blog post, or making vague accusations that they're so intrinsically evil we'll be cursed if we look at them too long.

Defederating means not interacting with the crowd Meta brings in. I have a bunch of other reasons but that's my main one. And before you suggest blocking, you can't possibly expect me to block all 10M of their users and the domain block is bugged. I know because I tried.

Your point here is that blocking all of meta's instance is too hard because instance blocking is buggy.

Besides, this place doesn't look like much of a barren wasteland since we're interacting with a bunch of people right now. I don't mind interacting with only weirdo nerds if they're nicer people. Quantity doesn't mean quality after all.

This is just refuting my characterization of this place as barren.

For the people who want to interact with Threads because of family and friends, they should just make an account there. Just don't let Meta destroy this small part of the internet.

This is saying nothing other than "Meta will destroy the fediverse", again, without articulating how that would be possible.

Shilling for Meta is a bad look.

Does it look like I care whether or not I agree with the hive mind?

They draw people in with unethical business practices, not fair competition like in your example.

My example included them buying out their competition which is not fair, it's blatantly anti-competitive. Fairness has nothing to do with anything I wrote.

People are not worried about people using Meta outside of the fediverse. In your analogy Meta is already easily accessible through the internet in general and people can feel free to use both without needing a special gate.

And in my example the gate doesn't harm the fediverse at all, it just makes it more convenient for users of both bbqs, being my entire point. There is nothing to be lost by federating with Meta.

Except in this analogy, Meta hasn't stolen food before. They run the largest bbq around, and have bought out previous corporate competitor bbqs, and now they're hosting a giant bbq one way or another, they're just suggesting you put a gate in the fence so that people can flow back and forth between the small community bbq and their large corporate one.

Is that going to make you nervous since they have such a cool giant bbq that people are inevitably going to want to go there? Yeah, but again, that's the case regardless of whether or not the gate goes in.

Your argument entirely boils down to "domain blocking is still buggy", when Threads doesn't even support ActivityPub yet.

Once it launches, just block their instance.

Lol, ironically my comments in this thread going against the hive mind have gotten more interaction than any others