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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • 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




  • 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.






  • 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.



  • 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.


  • 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.


  • Yeah, I’ve read that, and it’s not an example of a corporation killing a decentralized network through federation, it’s just a normal example of a corporation killing a decentralized network by having more money to make a better app.

    XMPP did not die because Google used that protocol, it died because people preferred using Google Talk over any of the XMPP apps. That would be the case regardless of whether Google used XMPP or not.



  • People have articulated all kinds of actual harms, including two possibilities in the OP, but frankly they’re irrelevant.

    No, they didn’t. The harm listed was that Meta will make a shinier platform that will syphon away users, that is happening regardless and is not a harm that is a result of federation, it’s a harm that’s a result of meta having more money to build a better platform.

    We know what Meta’s goals are, and we know they have absolutely no moral standards whatsoever. Exactly how they try to accomplish those goals doesn’t matter. We shouldn’t give them the opportunity to try anything.

    There goal is to launch a twitter competitor with a lot of users and make money off advertising. Nothing about that conflicts with the fediverse.

    Like I said, this thread is filled with a bunch of people shaking in their boots about the company who must not be named rather than actually providing sober rational assessment of what’s likely to happen.